A quantum computer has been used to create a horror video game called Quantum Backrooms – and it’s available to play online.

Peculiarities of quantum objects have long inspired philosophers and artists, and now game developers are getting the bug too. at Moth Quantum and his colleagues developed Quantum Backrooms, a horror game with labyrinthine levels generated by a real quantum computer.

The game draws inspiration from “the Backrooms,” a horror legend developed on internet forums that consists of moving through a series of endless rooms. In Wootton’s game, each room corresponds to the quantum state of a part of a quantum computer called a qubit, while connections between qubits correspond to possible paths between rooms.

Wootton says that in this way, Quantum Backrooms conveys the feeling of being stuck in a quantum computer. The player can look in a fixed direction, but everything they aren’t looking at is constantly changing until they focus their gaze on it, conveying the idea that states of quantum objects change when observed, he says.

Players don’t need access to quantum computers, as they were only used during the game’s development. Wootton says that he hopes that Quantum Backrooms will reach horror fans who will enjoy the new flavour of creepiness generated by the qubits. “A player can be given this link and not have any idea that it was run on a quantum computer,” he says. It is available to play .

at Aalto University in Finland says that hundreds of quantum games exist already, ranging from those that involve content generated on quantum hardware like Quantum Backrooms to those that rely on simulating quantum states on conventional computers. Access to quantum hardware still isn’t widespread, but the interest in quantum games is growing nevertheless, she says.

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Quantum Backrooms may not be a quantum-computing breakthrough, but it might be the most polished and playable version of a quantum game yet, says at King’s College London. He says that game developers are often at the forefront of innovating with novel computing technologies, so it is interesting to give them access to quantum hardware that is still impractical for most people. “Often, their unusual demands or ideas for new technology drives real change in research,” says Cook.

The Moth Quantum team hope that Quantum Backrooms will be a step towards quantum technology becoming more integrated in everyday consumer products. “Just as AI went from being a research product to suddenly becoming something very relevant to consumers within the past few years, I think that we’re going to see the same thing for quantum computing,” says Wootton.

On Q-Day, your privacy will be at stake. This is the moment when quantum computers break the encryption protecting the modern world, bank transactions become readable, private messages get exposed and even state secrets become vulnerable.

For years it sounded like sci-fi, something that was decades away from happening, if it happened at all. But now, research suggests that we may be hurtling towards Q-Day at a rapid speed.

In this video, New Scientist uncovers why many experts think the countdown to Q-Day may already have begun, and explains how quantum computers work and why these machines could both threaten the security of the modern world and unlock breakthroughs that could change our lives. Special thanks to Quantum Motion for letting us film at its facilities.

One of the most promising uses for quantum computers is to simulate proteins that could help us discover new drugs, but these devices are currently too error-prone for the task. However, two quantum computers have now broken a simulation record – determining the properties of a molecule with 12,635 atoms – with some help from supercomputers.

To understand the behaviour of drug molecules, we need to pin down the quantum states and energies of their electrons, a quantum problem that can often be solved only approximately on conventional computers.

A collaboration between researchers at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, the US tech firm IBM and the Japanese scientific institute RIKEN has instead turned to quantum computers, which “speak” quantum physics by default. They developed a hybrid approach that combines quantum computers and conventional supercomputers and used it to simulate two unprecedentedly large molecules, with one about 40 times bigger than the past largest molecule simulated using a quantum computer.

“This has been a dream of mine, and here we are,” says team member at the Cleveland Clinic.

The researchers used two IBM Heron quantum computers, one located at RIKEN and one at the Cleveland Clinic, and two supercomputers called Fugaku and Miyabi-G, which are among the most powerful in the world. For the molecules, the team chose two combinations of a protein and a small molecule, or “protein-ligand complexes”, that Merz says are well studied and popular as fundamental examples in biomedical sciences. The team also simulated them in a layer of water, bringing the results closer to mimicking how researchers work with the molecules in the lab.

Quantum computers alone currently have limited usefulness because of their relatively small size – which limits computing power – and their propensity to make errors. So, the team divided up the work of molecular simulations between the four machines, using the quantum computers only to calculate specific properties of some fragments of the molecules. The output was then handed to the supercomputers, and the whole calculation was a back-and-forth between the two types of computers over more than 100 hours. Even so, the team thinks the process was faster than it would have been without quantum hardware, says at IBM. The simulations also estimated the lowest energies of the molecules with an accuracy competitive with some more standard methods, though not yet unequivocally superior.

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at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania says the team offers something that’s hard to come by: namely, practical steps towards useful quantum calculations using hardware that’s actually in use. He adds that “the scale of the experiment is genuinely impressive”.

Liu also says the new approach should be encouraged as a way to make quantum computers useful even before they are made error-proof. However, whether it can be rigorously mathematically proved that there are cases where the hybrid method will always guarantee superior performance – quantum advantage – is still an open question, he says.

Chow says while the current work indicates that quantum hardware might be superior for some parts of the calculation, the new simulation record is just a first step rather than definitive. “There’s this groundswell of just pushing the envelope of what can be done,” he says. “To me, the exciting piece is that it’s just getting started.”