Designing and developing a quantum tic-tac-toe game for quantum computers

Abstract: The field of quantum computing can feel unintuitive and riddled with math for the uninitiated. Several attempts have been made to tackle this issue, one such example can be found in the use of boardgames. There exists multiple quantum versions of classical board games, such as chess and minesweeper. This thesis takes a closer look at one such game, called quantum tic-tac-toe, by Allan Goff. The aim of this thesis is to implement this game twice, once utilizing conventional programming techniques and once utilizing quantum computing, and compare the different solutions to answer whether there are any advantages or disadvantages to using one method over the other. There exists several computational models and paradigms within quantum computing. The one we have chosen to focus on in this thesis is quantum circuits. For the implementation we used Python and IBMs quantum computing framework Qiskit, where most of the game was made in Python. A small part was developed using Qiskit for quantum circuit generation and evaluation. The same part was developed once more using only Python’s standard libraries. This part was responsible for handling the game’s main quantum event. From the comparison we conclude that quantum circuits, and by extension quantum computing, had limited utility in this case. There were several disadvantages, such as no gain in time complexity despite the cost of heavier computations or specialized hardware, and its limited ability to easily express algorithms. The only advantage was the possibility of fairer games due to the potentially true randomness of quantum systems, compared to classical pseudorandom methods used in games today.