You hack your way through vines into the ziggurat and then follow dark passageways until arriving in a stone-block room. There's a sign on the wall. "Look up!" it reads. "Totally not a trap." You look up and then plunge into blackness.
This isn't just a trap. It's a quantum trap. Brought to you by Google.
Google has recently begun playing with a brand new Quantum computer -- one that it's sharing with researchers at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. And in an effort to spread the quantum computing fun, it's now released a brand new quantum module for the build-your-own-universe game Minecraft.
"We built the Quantum A.I. Lab to explore the potential of quantum computing, and figure out what questions we should be asking. One question is clear: Where will future quantum computer scientists come from?" Google's Quantum Artificial Intelligence Team wrote in a post announcing the new module today. "Our best guess: Minecraft."
The module is called qCraft, and while it's not an exact simulation of quantum physics, it's a nifty little learning module. It lets you build structures that act in quantum ways: buildings that look like castles when viewed from one direction and skyscrapers from another; floors, like those in the ziggurat trap, that vanish when you look away.
Or, as Google puts it: "It lets players experiment with quantum behaviors inside Minecraft’s world, with new blocks that exhibit quantum entanglement, superposition, and observer dependency."
The module was built by Google, an educational organization called MinecraftEdu and Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter.
Take a tour of Minecraft's new quantum world here: