While computers may be able to beat people at such games as chess, a recent research study has found that artificial intelligence has nothing on gamers and human intuition when it comes to figuring out complex quantum physics problems. The experiment was to design a game that mirrored and presented a challenging physics problem that scientists have been struggling with and to see if humans were more capable of figuring things out than their massive quantum computers. Turns out they were right.
The research was recently published in Nature and the experiment discovered that AI could stand to take a few lessons from ingrained human intuition and problem solving. Jacob Sherson, a physicist at Aarhus University in Denmark, had been struggling with the problem of creating a quantum computer when, back in 2012, he heard how gaming, and the potential crowdscourced nature of it, was being used to solve complicated problems. So, he invented a game called Quantum Moves which is an online game designed to try and solve a particular quantum physics problem.
The game has been specifically designed to deal with the problem of slow processing by the quantum computers. The object for the players is to try and discover some manner of speed limit with regard to how quickly data can be manipulated by the computer. Computing errors can happen in the quantum computers due to a superposition challenge. Superposition is where the data is in qubits where the 0’s and the 1’s can be in the same state at the same time. The challenge is the computer is extremely sensitive and even the slightest sound or movement interference will cause the superposition to break down and cause calculation errors.
Sherson and his team are convinced that human problem solving skills and intuitiveness still remains superior to computers. Quantum Moves was played by around 10,000 gamers and the results were that the quantum speed limit was successfully broken by finishing a half a million games. The original version of the game was called Bring Home Water where players had to move atoms around as fast as they could inside the quantum buckets that the atoms were located in.
Some of the best players at the game were regularly beating all of the algorithms and it led the scientists to alter their software to take advantage of the best scenarios and solutions that the successful gamers had come up with.
Sherson said of the results that, “Our results demonstrate the comparison between man and machine still sometimes favors us.We are very far from computers with human-type cognition.”
PHOTO SOURCE: Sciencenews.org