Show HN: Play with real quantum physics in your browser

Hey HN! Creator here. Sorry for the downtime and dizzying spinning coins.<p>I was surprised to see this on the frontpage this morning and the scale is pushing the limits of our quantum randomness generator<p>It should be working again now as I&#x27;m pushing fixes. Thanks for your patience.

quantum physicist here. I code with quantum computers (well, simulators most of the time) quite a lot.<p>This is a cool demo and a great first effort, but does it really use IBM&#x27;s quantum computer? From my experience, the queues are generally quite long and and it takes atleast 10-15 secs from submission to getting your results back. And getting a single bit back is hugely inefficient. My guess is that you are submitting a circuit with hadamard on all the qubits with 1000-10000 shots and storing the results and showing them to people one by one? This might be misleading as you are not actually connected to the ibm quantum computer and generating random numbers in real-time.<p>Plus, since the ibm quantum comptuers exhibit a lot of noise, you are not getting truly random numbers. A better introduction to generating random numbers and also certifying them is available: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dorahacksglobal&#x2F;quantum-randomness-generator&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dorahacksglobal&#x2F;quantum-randomness-genera...</a><p>You can play with this on qBraid.com and try out even more quantum computers. We actually used this as a hackathon challenge at South Carolina Hackathon. Keep on building and join us at future events!

A few years ago I heard a story on NPR about someone who built a site that also used the IBM quantum backend. They had you input a question about what you should do with your life (I think the example was &quot;Should I grow a beard?&quot;). Then the quantum backend would give you a yes or no answer.<p>The idea here is that if you believe the many worlds interpretation then that quantum decision splits the universe in two, and in one universe you grow a beard, and in the other you don&#x27;t.<p>I thought it was a fun idea.

Considering this states its talking to an actual quantum computer somewhere(at least that&#x27;s what I&#x27;m led to believe by the &quot;Connected to &lt;some instance somewhere&gt;&quot; in the bottom right), I&#x27;d imagine this has gotten hugged to death, and hence why we are only seeing the spinning coins rather than it actually resolving.

As someone that has basically zero background in quantum, is there some kind of &quot;aha&quot; thing I&#x27;m supposed to observe here?<p>The details for what a quantum coin flip is has the description &quot;your friends will think you&#x27;re a wizard.&quot;<p>Why? I certainly don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m a wizard right now.

When I click the coin I see an animation of 7-8 blurry coins spinning. Further clicking seems to have no effect. Is something else supposed to happen?

It&#x27;s not true that computer randomness is predictable, all recent computers have entropy sources which are essentially quantum in nature - thermal noise.

Thank you for sharing!<p>As a small remark, classical and quantum coins are equally susceptible to bias. So the initial intro is a bit misleading.

Nice idea, but watching the spinning coins made me a bit nauseous. I had to go away from the page.

I watched how it works, but it seems the rotation is just an animation and a fake. There are two requests: &#x2F;flip and &#x2F;info. When you click mouse button, the &#x2F;flip request is GET immediately and it returns a result of 1(eagle) or 0. After that the coin animation begins with requests to &#x2F;info which always returns the same response for no clear reason. After several &#x2F;info requests the coin eventually stops without receiving any new results.<p>$ curl <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quantum.orgsoft.org&#x2F;info" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quantum.orgsoft.org&#x2F;info</a><p>{&quot;status&quot;:&quot;ok&quot;,&quot;message&quot;:&quot;Connected to IBM Eagle r3 (127 qubits)&quot;,&quot;display_name&quot;:&quot;Eagle r3 (127 qubits)&quot;,&quot;alias&quot;:&quot;ibm_kyiv&quot;,&quot;version&quot;:&quot;1.20.22&quot;,&quot;num_qubits&quot;:127,&quot;processor&quot;:&quot;Eagle r3&quot;,&quot;url&quot;:&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quantum.ibm.com&#x2F;services&#x2F;resources?system=ibm_kyiv" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quantum.ibm.com&#x2F;services&#x2F;resources?system=ibm_kyiv</a>&quot;}<p>$ curl <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quantum.orgsoft.org&#x2F;flip" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quantum.orgsoft.org&#x2F;flip</a><p>1

I just see a bunch of spinning coins forever and nothing happens with no way to stop it...

Quantum logic gate &gt; Universal logic gates: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Quantum_logic_gate#Universal_quantum_gates" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Quantum_logic_gate#Universal_q...</a><p>From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37379123">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37379123</a> :<p>&gt; [ Rx, Ry, Rz, P, CCNOT, CNOT, H, S, T ]<p>From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39341752">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39341752</a> :<p>&gt;&gt; <i>How many ways are there to roll a {2, 8, or 6}-sided die with qubits and quantum embedding?</i><p>From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42092621">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42092621</a> :<p>&gt; <i>Exercise: Implement a</i> QuantumQ <i>circuit puzzle level with Cirq or QISkit in a Jupyter notebook</i><p>ray-pH&#x2F;quantumQ &gt; [Godot] &quot;Web WASM build&quot; issue #5: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ray-pH&#x2F;quantumQ&#x2F;issues&#x2F;5">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ray-pH&#x2F;quantumQ&#x2F;issues&#x2F;5</a>

I&#x27;ve wondered for a long time what the user experience for quantum computing will look like. I had imagined some library with a type for &quot;qbit&quot; and an dsl for making them interact in certain ways and then some kind of async thing where your classical code could run locally while periodically shuttling data to and from wherever the quantum computer is.<p>This isn&#x27;t quite that but I guess it&#x27;s a first step.

Question from someone who&#x27;s not going to even pretend to understand quantum physics..<p>The explanation says the visualization shows the coin in all possible states. I&#x27;m trying to count quickly and it seems like about 8. Does all possible states mean there&#x27;s an infinite number and 8 are shown for visualization purposes, or is there a finite predictable number of possible states.

My observation is too weak, the coins keep spinning.<p>Maybe I am so disconnected from the rest of reality, I count as absolute, non destructive observer?

This seems to do roughly the same as the Universe Splitter [0]. (Which used to be free? Not sure.)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cheapuniverses.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cheapuniverses.com&#x2F;</a><p>Earlier discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30499169">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30499169</a>

In the many worlds interpretation, if one connected this computer to a machine that would instantly kill you if the result was heads, you as the observer should find that you never die, but rather that the machine always seems to come up tails. Is that correct? Might be cool for some kind of euthanasia patient to experience.

The animation reminds me me of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Devs_(TV_series)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Devs_(TV_series)</a>

A physical coin is biased?

Cool idea! This is a really clever way to demo a real-world circuit!

Is this truly live or did they batch random numbers ahead of time?

from the console<p>&gt; Failed to get quantum result from server<p>cloudflare connection timed out

I wonder what the cost of running this website is?

Got 2 tails in a row. Must be broken.

_real_?

Tangent, but interesting: how do you get fair samples from a biased coin? 1. You take a string of biased samples like 001011100101 2. you split it in pairs 00 10 11 10 01 01 3. you keep only pairs with a zero and a one in them 10 10 01 01 4. You assign 0 and 1 to them, e.g. 1 1 0 0, this is a fair sampling from an unbiased coin<p>Why does it work? Because even if p(0) ≠ p(1), p(01) = p(10).