Show HN: Play with real quantum physics in your browser
16 comments
·February 4, 2025ziofill
Tangent, but interesting: how do you get fair samples from a biased coin? 1. You take a string of biased samples like 001011100101 2. you split it in pairs 00 10 11 10 01 01 3. you keep only pairs with a zero and a one in them 10 10 01 01 4. You assign 0 and 1 to them, e.g. 1 1 0 0, this is a fair sampling from an unbiased coin
Why does it work? Because even if p(0) ≠ p(1), p(01) = p(10).
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."
herodotus
Nice idea, but watching the spinning coins made me a bit nauseous. I had to go away from the page.
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__MatrixMan__
I've wondered for a long time what the user experience for quantum computing will look like. I had imagined some library with a type for "qbit" and an dsl for making them interact in certain ways and then some kind of async thing where your classical code could run locally while periodically shuttling data to and from wherever the quantum computer is.
This isn't quite that but I guess it's a first step.
scottmsul
I just see a bunch of spinning coins forever and nothing happens with no way to stop it...
l00sed
Same....
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.
brap
Is this truly live or did they batch random numbers ahead of time?
sinan
Technical Details section of help explains "we buffer batches of coin flips in advance to ensure a responsive experience. Your coin flips are always drawn directly from a quantum circuit, though no necessarily in real-time."
Rooster61
In reality, it's a room full of interns flipping quarters and averaging their results in "real time"
asparagui
Cool idea! This is a really clever way to demo a real-world circuit!
Traubenfuchs
My observation is too weak, the coins keep spinning.
Maybe I am so disconnected from the rest of reality, I count as absolute, non destructive observer?
jwpapi
A physical coin is biased?
isotropy
Empirically, human-flipped coins have about a 1% bias toward the same side they started on: https://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/math-history/hap7-fifty-o...
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...