Everytime you hear about quantum physics, you can be certain someone will mention a cat in a box... Intrigued by the cat metaphor, you decide to attempt the experiment yourself.

You take your best box and approach your cat, Handsome Eli.

You throw Eliโ€™s favourite treat in the box, and he jumps in. You close the lid with haste before realizing you did not give him a little pet on the head! You open the box to pet Eli, but the box is empty... where's the cat?!

Eli is nowhere to be found...




The application



The Yale Quantum Institute, Yale Library Digital Humanities Lab and Juego Studio invite you to experience the art & quantum science application โ€œThaumCATropeโ€, the latest collaboration between science communicator Florian Carle and artist Martha W. Lewis.

This educational experience will demonstrate how quantum computers will speed up computations, learn more about quantum science, and will give you the opportunity to discover some of New Havenโ€™s hidden secrets!



Your Mission

You lost your cat! Launch yourself on a mission to find Handsome Eli (the cat version of our beloved Handsome Dan)! Click on the arrows to change locations and explore Yale and New Haven locations by selecting the highlighted part of the images to learn more about quantum science and its history in New Haven. Keep an eye out for your cat as you explore each location (Hint: he cannot be in location you already visited).

The app is divided in two parts: a classical search where you will have to use classical logic, you will have to visit locations one after the other (like a binary system, left OR right, 0 OR 1...) until you find the cat. Once you find the cat in this mode, you will enter a second part the quantum search, where all the locations are entangled and in superposition of state (left AND right at the same time, and everything in between, 0 AND 1...), allowing you a much fast search for the cat as you can see all locations at once.

Both searches are timed, and you will see how long it took you to find the cat in both modes. While this app is fully classical (no quantum computers are used to run it), we hope this metaphorical approach shows you why quantum computers will be much faster than classical computers for some tasks and will allow us to perform calculations not be possible on classical computers within a reasonable computational time.



Speed Running Leadership Score



While we created this app as a slow and contemplative experience to explore in deepth New Haven's secrets and learn about quanutm science, with an art style reminding of old timey postcard, bleached by the sun, we noticed at the launch a lot of players tried to find the cat as soon as possible... Sowe built a learderboard!



Player Classical Time Quantum Time
๐Ÿ‡ซ๐Ÿ‡ท FlofloFlr 1m 2s 10s
๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ Rhea Hirshman 1m 34s 1m 8s
๐Ÿ‡ซ๐Ÿ‡ท Jean Claude Carle 1m 53s 16s
๐Ÿ‡น๐Ÿ‡ฟ Harsh Babla 3m 20s 18s
๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ A-A-A 3m 21s 24s
๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ Sheri Miller 3m 28s 48s
๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ Erin 3m 39s 57s
๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ Dale 3m 47s 1m 6s
๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ Graham 3m 49s 38s
๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ Marj 4m 20s 1m 37s
๐Ÿ‡ซ๐Ÿ‡ท Pauline Carle 4m 26s 46s
๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ Gabriel Suriel 6m 10s 19s

To be added to the leadership board, send a screenshot of your times to yqi@yale.edu.





Click the cat to begin the search!