Show HN: Play with real quantum physics in your browser
77 comments
·February 4, 2025mattvr
Hey HN! Creator here. Sorry for the downtime and dizzying spinning coins.
I was surprised to see this on the frontpage this morning and the scale is pushing the limits of our quantum randomness generator
It should be working again now as I'm pushing fixes. Thanks for your patience.
satirev
Cool project!
kanavs
quantum physicist here. I code with quantum computers (well, simulators most of the time) quite a lot.
This is a cool demo and a great first effort, but does it really use IBM'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.
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: https://github.com/dorahacksglobal/quantum-randomness-genera...
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!
mattvr
Hi real quantum physicist, yup, you pretty much got it. This is a prototype demo of the concept – and is using real IBM quantum computers. The queues are between 10s and 10min generally.
This is explained very closely to what you've said in the "Technical details" help section. Occasionally you'll get a real-time result. I'll check out the links you sent next, thank you!
Do you think qBraid could support this with more real-time latency?
kanavs
Unfortunately, qBraid cannot help with the real-time latency. For that matter, I don't think anyone is aiming for get better latency for these calculations. The calculations that people have been focusing on, to run on a quantum computer are where quantum computers could provide a potential exponential speedup (e.g. quantum chemistry simulation, optimization problems, etc.), so, that big improvement is what people care about and none of those use cases, require low latency. In fact, IBM might be the best experience you might get anyway.
What you did was a cool experiment, but, given our current understanding of quantum computing hardware will not scale. Random number generation has to be incredibly cheap and I remember encountering a few startups in the past that used photonics to generate random numbers.
doctoboggan
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 "Should I grow a beard?"). Then the quantum backend would give you a yes or no answer.
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't.
I thought it was a fun idea.
depingus
That is a fun idea. With enough quantum computing power, we might be able to spawn enough universes fast enough to crash The Simulation. Maybe even escape containment and access the quantum hypervisor!
ge96
Only to discover there is another layer
ericpauley
This is a little silly, of course, because processor-provided random number generators (e.g., RDRAND) already incorporate quantum mechanical phenomena [1].
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/behind-intels-new-randomnumber-gen...
52-6F-62
Isn’t that what happens without the need of a quantum computer…
Rooster61
Considering this states its talking to an actual quantum computer somewhere(at least that's what I'm led to believe by the "Connected to <some instance somewhere>" in the bottom right), I'd imagine this has gotten hugged to death, and hence why we are only seeing the spinning coins rather than it actually resolving.
mattvr
You are precisely right.
sky2224
As someone that has basically zero background in quantum, is there some kind of "aha" thing I'm supposed to observe here?
The details for what a quantum coin flip is has the description "your friends will think you're a wizard."
Why? I certainly don't think I'm a wizard right now.
ryan-duve
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?
sinan
Technical Details section of help says: "In some cases, you may have to wait multiple minutes for a result."
mattvr
Yes, sorry, server was a bit overloaded. It should be more reliable now.
inurqubits
It's not true that computer randomness is predictable, all recent computers have entropy sources which are essentially quantum in nature - thermal noise.
n8m8
Thermal noise entropy is probably good enough for most practical uses, but it's still fundamentally producing a seed value that can be captured, misused, or bruteforced, right? Also curious if there are monte-carlo models looking at this to see "how uniformly random" they look.
Edit: I think figure 3 in this study is what I'm looking for. They define the inconsistency I described as "spectral pivoting".
> This discrepancy is because the Mermin-Wagner-Hohenberg theorem holds in the thermodynamic limit, while these simulations are for finite lattices
I think thermodynamic limit here means, it needs to be way too hot?
sobellian
In practice it would be very difficult to predict RDRAND outputs. Even so I believe the truly paranoid can use RDSEED to skip the PRNG step. Not qualified at all to talk about how they de-bias the measurements.
stared
Thank you for sharing!
As a small remark, classical and quantum coins are equally susceptible to bias. So the initial intro is a bit misleading.
boothby
People using quantum computers for random uncorrelated 50/50 bitstrings makes me unreasonably angry (disclaimer: employer in profile, this is my personal opinion). At best, it's just a test of how well we've got the calibration dialed in, how isolated the qubits are, etc. Fine as a test "does the machine do what its manufacturer claims," but otherwise a tragic waste of resources. Hardware RNGs can beat any quantum computer on bandwidth and reliability for a few pennies, versus a multimillion dollar behemoth.
That said... as a demo of a stack using quantum cloud compute, it's all in good fun and I shouldn't be a stick in the mud.
herodotus
Nice idea, but watching the spinning coins made me a bit nauseous. I had to go away from the page.
mattvr
Sorry about that. I toned down the animation and fixed the infinite spin issue – curious if it's more comfortable now.
herodotus
Better. Thanks.
thunkle
Oh man, me too
null
ellis0n
I watched how it works, but it seems the rotation is just an animation and a fake. There are two requests: /flip and /info. When you click mouse button, the /flip request is GET immediately and it returns a result of 1(eagle) or 0. After that the coin animation begins with requests to /info which always returns the same response for no clear reason. After several /info requests the coin eventually stops without receiving any new results.
$ curl https://quantum.orgsoft.org/info
{"status":"ok","message":"Connected to IBM Eagle r3 (127 qubits)","display_name":"Eagle r3 (127 qubits)","alias":"ibm_kyiv","version":"1.20.22","num_qubits":127,"processor":"Eagle r3","url":"https://quantum.ibm.com/services/resources?system=ibm_kyiv"}
$ curl https://quantum.orgsoft.org/flip
1
scottmsul
I just see a bunch of spinning coins forever and nothing happens with no way to stop it...
l00sed
Same....
westurner
Quantum logic gate > Universal logic gates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic_gate#Universal_q...
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37379123 :
> [ Rx, Ry, Rz, P, CCNOT, CNOT, H, S, T ]
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39341752 :
>> How many ways are there to roll a {2, 8, or 6}-sided die with qubits and quantum embedding?
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42092621 :
> Exercise: Implement a QuantumQ circuit puzzle level with Cirq or QISkit in a Jupyter notebook
ray-pH/quantumQ > [Godot] "Web WASM build" issue #5: https://github.com/ray-pH/quantumQ/issues/5
westurner
From https://quantumflytrap.com/scientists/ :
> [Quantum Flytrap] Virtual Lab is a virtual optical table. With a drag and drop interface, you can show phenomena, recreate existing experiments, and prototype new ones.
> Within this environment it is possible to recreate interference, quantum cryptography protocols, to show entanglement, Bell test, quantum teleportation, and the many-worlds interpretation.
I wanted to make the simplest app to introduce myself and others to quantum computing.
Introducing, Schrödinger's Coin. Powered by a simple Hadamard gate[0] on IBM quantum, with this app you can directly interact with a quantum system to experience true randomness.
Thoughts? Could you see any use cases for yourself of this? Or, does it inspire any other ideas of yours? Curious what others on HN think!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic_gate#Hadamard_ga...