Quantum Darts

Quantum Darts

Inspiration

Our team was inspired to create a quantum darts game by the desire to make learning and visualizing quantum mechanics concepts more engaging and enjoyable. In our years of studying physics, being introduced to physics concepts in a fun and interactive way, allowing us to grasp complex ideas and build an intuitive understanding of them, inspired us to study physics. By merging the excitement of a darts game with the quantum mechanics concept of wave collapsing, we hope to make quantum physics more accessible and captivating for all, bridging the gap between learning and having fun.

What it does

Quantum Darts introduces the quantum mechanics concept of wave collapsing to the famous game of Darts. The player can see a 2D visualization of the wave function and then choose to collapse it when they think it will make the biggest score. Of course, quantum comes with its probabilities, so good luck!

How we built it

We first tried to make a quantum pong game, but then realized that it was going to be too complicated. We decided to just start coding the visualization of the wave function with different colours representing the different probabilities, and with this visualization, we thought about a darts game! We built the game using PyGame, which is a Python package that can help create games and visualization.

Challenges we ran into

Coding the wavefunction turned out to be really complicated and that's where most of our time went. We also had trouble coding the point systems in the game, and measuring where the collapsed particle was. We also wanted to put the game on a website using pygbag and asyncio packages, but it turned out to be really slow, so we decided that it was better to keep it as a Python Script and run in on PyCharm.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Even though we might not have been able to do everything we wanted to do, we are still proud of what we did and we learned a lot through it.

What we learned

Learning how to use PyGame was really fun and interesting, so that's definitely something we will remember. We also learned how to code physics visualizations, which is really useful for many physics problems.

What's next for Quantum Darts

Hopefully be able to make a better point system and a more complicated target, as well as be able to code it in a website and optimize it. We also want to make a better interface so that the user can choose different harmonics and potentials. The final goal is also to add different players so that they can share the joys of physics together!