Defending quantum chess champion takes the title again in 2021 tournament

Returning champion Aleksander Kubica successful defended his title and won the second annual quantum chess tournament during last week's Q2B conference on quantum computing. The tournament was streamed live in collaboration with Chess.com December 7-8.

As we've reported previously, quantum chess (as played in the tournament) is the brainchild of Chris Cantwell of Quantum Realm Games. When he was a graduate student in quantum computing at the University of Southern California, he got the idea while working on a project for a class on creativity and invention.

“My initial goal was to create a version of quantum chess that was truly quantum in nature, so you get to play with the phenomenon,” Cantwell told Gizmodo back in 2016. “I didn’t want it to just be a game that taught people quantum mechanics.” By playing the game, the player slowly develops an intuitive sense of the rules governing the quantum realm. In fact, “I feel like I’ve come to more intuitively understand quantum phenomena myself, just by making the game,” he said.