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Board games for quantum computers

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Abstract

Scalable board games, including Five in a Row (or Gomoku) and Weiqi (or Go), are generalized so that they can be played on or by quantum computers. We adopt three principles for the generalization: the first two are to ensure that the games are compatible with quantum computer and the third is to ensure that the standard classical games are the special cases. We demonstrate how to construct basic quantum moves and use them to set up quantum games. There are three different schemes to play the quantized games: one quantum computer with another quantum computer (QwQ), two classical computer playing with each other on one quantum computer (CQC), and one classical computer with another classical computer (CwC). We illustrate these results with the games of Five in a Row and Weiqi.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Key R&D Program of China (Grants Nos. 2017YFA0303302, 2018YFA0305602), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11921005), and Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Major Project (Grant No. 2019SHZDZX01). We dedicate this work to Professor P. W. Anderson, who was a very good amateur Weiqi (or Go) player and would probably view a quantum game of Weiqi as a spin-1 system on a square lattice.

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Correspondence to Biao Wu.

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Wu, B., Chen, H. & Luo, Z. Board games for quantum computers. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 64, 122501 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-020-3038-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-020-3038-x

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