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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

With particles that can exist in two places at once, the quantum world is often considered to be inherently counterintuitive. Now, a group of scientists has created a video game that follows the laws of quantum mechanics, but at which non-physicist human players excel (J. J. W. H. Sørensen et al. Nature 532, 210–213; 2016 [nature.com]).

One implication of the team’s results is that efforts to use computer games to crowdsource solutions to science problems can now be extended to quantum physics [nature.com]. In the past, such gamification projects have been limited to challenging but less mind-bending problems, such as protein folding [nature.com].

But the work also suggests that the human mind might be more capable of grasping the rules of the bizarre quantum world than previously thought [nature.com] — a revelation that could have implications for how scientists approach quantum physics, says Jacob Sherson, a quantum physicist at Aarhus University, Denmark, who led the study. “Maybe we should allow some of that normal intuition to enter our problem solving,” he says. Scientists studying quantum foundations have also long said that finding a more intuitive approach to quantum physics [nature.com] could help to crack outstanding puzzles, although many doubted that this would ever be possible without new theories.

The technique might help with topics thornier than quantum mechanics, like understanding the opposite sex.

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