Enter the quantum realm James Wootton

I’m staring at a bunch of blocky, low-resolution trees on a desert island. In the distance, dozens of jagged rocks are sticking out of the sea. To anyone who has played Minecraft, the virtual landscape looks familiar, but this one is different: it was designed by a quantum computer.

It doesn’t look very quantum to me, but that isn’t really the point. Instead, this is a proof of concept by tech firm IBM that hints at how quantum computers could generate scenes, levels or even complete video games that are better than the ones we have today.

The basic building blocks of a quantum computer are known as qubits. These store information and can be used to perform calculations. Yet while the physical properties of a ordinary computer bit can be pinned down exactly, qubits have an element of randomness.


To build the island, IBM extracts this randomness and converts it into a height map – essentially a topographic map of all of the high and low points in the game’s terrain. Trees and other elements can be built in the same way and generating the whole island takes around a minute.

James Robin Wootton, a member of the IBM team, says a discerning eye can spot this quantumness in the roughness of the terrain. Randomness is often used in video games to vary scenes, but it can leave marks that are easy to recognise if you know what you are looking for, says Wootton. Using quantum computers could make those random elements seem more natural.

The rest of the game – from the way the graphics are rendered to how players can move around – is controlled by an ordinary, or classical, computer.

In the future, quantum computers could also be used to generate parts of games. For example, if players have to solve a puzzle in a game, it is typically created by hand. A quantum computer could automate this process by searching the huge number of possible puzzle configurations and picking ones that are actually solvable, says Wootton.

He and his colleagues would like to team up with a commercial game studio in the next couple of years and use a quantum computer to help generate parts of a game.

“While a quantum level generator sounds unbelievably futuristic and cool, it might be a while before we see its impact on game development,” says Mike Cook at Queen Mary University of London. He says that game developers often prefer to use inferior techniques because they are easier to work with than more complex ones that theoretically deliver better results.

This isn’t the first time that a video game has used a quantum computer. In 2017, Wootton and his colleagues built a version of Battleships that ran on a quantum computer.

IBM paid for New Scientist’s travel and accommodation to visit its research lab in Zurich.

We clarified the funding of the trip