About

Quantum TiqTaqToe is a game you can play like regular TicTacToe. But who wants regular TicTacToe if you can have quantum moves? This game will allow you to build intuition for the strangeness of the quantum realm. Can you find a winning quantum strategy? Read more about the app’s history in this blog post.

Quantum TiqTaqToe was developed with support from the IQIM at Caltech.

Get the app!

Get it on Google Play

The Android and iPhone apps have a quantum AI you can play against, and features a tutorial that teaches you how to play the game. You can also log in to play against your friends!

Please contact me at [email protected] if you are interested in getting the app for educational purposes!

If you don’t want the app, have a go at the online version!
Please play this in a PC browser window.

Quantum Disclaimer

Quantum TiqTaqToe is fully implementable on a quantum computer, if you encode qutrits in pairs of qubits. That means that under the hood I essentially keep track of the wavefunction of the game, and that each move you perform is implementable by a unitary circuit (to be specific, the quantumness comes from a square-root-SWAP gate).

For the purposes of keeping the game fun and playable, I classically limit some of the moves; i.e. I check whether some moves are allowed by the rules of the game and prevent the unitaries from acting if they aren’t. For example, adding a superposition on top of your opponent’s superposition is perfectly fine quantum-mechanically-speaking, but would result in a 4-way superposition that is very hard to represent visually. So I’ve left that out, for now! If you have suggestions, please do let me know! 🙂

Last, I wish to mention that this version of Quantum TiqTaqToe is not associated with the one described on this cool Wikipedia page, nor with the corresponding mobile apps mentioned there. This visualization and the rules are something I came up with myself. Perhaps both approaches can be combined at some point.

Feedback

Please direct all of your comments and suggestions directly to me ([email protected]).