Talk on "Gamifying quantum research: harnessing human intuition"

In the emerging field of citizen science ordinary citizens have already contributed to research in as diverse fields as astronomy, protein and RNA folding, and neuron mapping by playing online games. In the www.scienceathome.org project, we have extended this democratized research to the realm of quantum physics by gamifying a class of challenges related to optimization of gate operations in a quantum computer. The games have been played by more than 200,000 players and perhaps surprisingly we observe that a large fraction of the players outperform state-of-the-art optimization algorithms [1]. In recent work [2], we have launched our new open-access quantum research lab: an easily accessible remote interface for our ultra-cold atoms experiment allowing amateur scientists, students, and research institutions world-wide to perform state-of-the-art quantum experimentation. In the first test, a team of theoretical optimal control researchers employ a Remote version of their dCRAB optimization algorithm (RedCRAB), and secondly a gamified “democratic-lab” interface allowed 600 citizen scientists from around the world to participate in the optimization. In both cases solutions improving previous best performance were found. Within the new www.quatomic.org project, we are attempting to create visual software tools to enable intuition-based theoretical quantum research as well as a non-formalistic but powerful introduction to university level quantum education.
Finally, with a palette of additional games within cognitive science, behavioral economics, and corporate innovation we investigate the general features of individual and collaborative problem solving to shed additional light on the process of human intuition and innovation and potentially develop novel models of artificial intelligence.  

Refs:
[1] JJ Sørensen et al, Nature, 532, 210 (2016)
[2] R. Heck et al, arXiv:1709.02230