Quantum housing

Quantum house

Inspiration

We wanted to create customized buildings in Minecraft to make a city. We wanted our city to be procedural generated - no two houses in the city should be identical. This expands over the existing functionality of villages, which have premade assets that are placed in a world. The project was inspired by YouTuber Jabrils's attempt at the Waveform Collapse Algorithm, another procedural generation algorithm, on a quantum computer. The drawback for Jabrils's waveform collapse implementation was twofold: he could only make small houses due to memory limitations on Qiskit and his algorithm took a very long time to run(>20 minutes for similar sized structures to ours). We wanted a similar project to Jabrils's, but without the runtime. We also wanted to actually get buildings in minecraft, which did not do.

What it does

Our algorithm creates a QUBO Formulation which is sent to a DWave Quantum Annealer running on the cloud. It then encodes the Quantum Annealer's outputs as a Minecraft NBT file. Then, we can copy paste the nbt file into a Minecraft world and load in using structure blocks.

How we built it

Python, DWave's Quantum processing units, Minecraft, and NBTs Our algorithm works by specifying a QUBO Formulation. The Q matrix is formed using a penalty function H that forces the house to have crafting tables, chests, furnaces, walls, a ceiling, and a floor. We were able to specify restrictions using customized "Quantum Logic Gates." Each gate is a class that checks for a condition like Equality, Or, etc. We then send our Qubo Formulation to a DWave quantum annealer on the cloud, which gives us back a valid arrangement of blocks that minimizes our penalty function. We then save this house as an NBT file and load it in Minecraft

Challenges we ran into

Quantum computers are very small. The one we used was a hybrid that had 2000 qubits, so the houses generated are size-limited and we can only use a few very basic blocks. Also Minecraft doesn't have a library of items so we had to use our own encoding. Also quantum logic is really foreign.