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 Eli’s favourite treat in the box, and he jumps in. You close the lid with haste before realizing the trap's still in your hand! You open the box to add it, but... 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 “ThaumCATrope”, 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 Haven’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 player tried to find the cat as soon as possible!
| Player | Classical Time | Quantum Time |
|---|---|---|
| 🇺🇸 FlofloFlr | 1m 2s | 10s |
| 🇫🇷 Jean Claude Carle | 1m 53s | 16s |
| 🇫🇷 Pauline Carle | 4m 26s | 46s |
To be added to the leadership board, send a screenshot of your times to yqi@yale.edu.