Quantum Computers Are Too Weak to Run Doom🤒
The 1993 game Doom has such modest system requirements by today's standards that it can be run on some of the most unexpected devices: a tiny screen embedded in a Backspace key, a Christmas ornament, a voxel display, another game, an AI system, a smart lawnmower, or even a standard Windows program. But not a quantum computer.
Developer Luke Mortimer from Barcelona published a project on GitHub called Quandoom, where he recreated the first level of the iconic shooter to run on a quantum computer. He concluded that, for now, there is no quantum machine powerful enough to run it. However, he was able to create an "efficient simulation" on a laptop. Running Quandoom requires 70,000 qubits and 80 million logic gates. The most powerful quantum computer to date, built by Atom Computing, has 1,225 qubits.
And this isn't even the full game. The adaptation of just the first level in Quandoom features basic wireframe graphics, with no music or sound, and enemies that cannot move between rooms. Yet even this is too much for current quantum computers.
"I’m still refining the engine code, but at the core, I have 8,000 lines of C++ functions that allow reversible binary and arithmetic operations on quantum registers, like 'flipIfLessThanOrEqualTo,' which flips all qubits in a register if the value of another register is less than a given one. Everything is done with integers. Using these functions, I wrote a small 3D engine and all the game logic," Mortimer explained in the description of Quandoom.
The 1993 game Doom has such modest system requirements by today's standards that it can be run on some of the most unexpected devices: a tiny screen embedded in a Backspace key, a Christmas ornament, a voxel display, another game, an AI system, a smart lawnmower, or even a standard Windows program. But not a quantum computer.
Developer Luke Mortimer from Barcelona published a project on GitHub called Quandoom, where he recreated the first level of the iconic shooter to run on a quantum computer. He concluded that, for now, there is no quantum machine powerful enough to run it. However, he was able to create an "efficient simulation" on a laptop. Running Quandoom requires 70,000 qubits and 80 million logic gates. The most powerful quantum computer to date, built by Atom Computing, has 1,225 qubits.
And this isn't even the full game. The adaptation of just the first level in Quandoom features basic wireframe graphics, with no music or sound, and enemies that cannot move between rooms. Yet even this is too much for current quantum computers.
"I’m still refining the engine code, but at the core, I have 8,000 lines of C++ functions that allow reversible binary and arithmetic operations on quantum registers, like 'flipIfLessThanOrEqualTo,' which flips all qubits in a register if the value of another register is less than a given one. Everything is done with integers. Using these functions, I wrote a small 3D engine and all the game logic," Mortimer explained in the description of Quandoom.