Hello, and welcome to the Physics World weekly
podcast. I'm Hamish Johnston.
Today,
many creative industries are reliant on cutting edge
digital technologies,
so it's not surprising that this sector could
easily become an early adopter of quantum computing.
In this episode, I'm in conversation with James
Wootton, who is chief scientific officer at Moth
Quantum.
Based in The UK and Switzerland,
the company is developing
quantum software tools for the creative industries,
focusing on artists,
musicians,
and game developers.
James joined Moth in September
2024
after working on quantum error correction at IBM.
He also has a long standing interest in
quantum gaming
and in creating tools that make quantum computing
more accessible.
He joins me down the line from Basil.
That interview is coming up. But first, a
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Hi, James. Welcome to the podcast.
Hi. Great to be here.
So, James, can you give us a brief
in introduction to Moth?
What does it produce, and how many employees
does it have?
Yes. So Moth is a quantum computing startup,
and there are many quantum computing startups. Some
of them focus on hardware. We're not one
of those.
We're one of the quantum software startups.
Often,
quantum software startups will focus on a particular
industry. You have some looking at health care.
You have some looking at finance.
But we are the only one who focus
on the creative industries, so things like games
and,
and art and music.
So what we produce is is quantum software.
We produce,
software for people products for people to be
able to use quantum computing
in their creative practices.
That could be from no code interfaces where
people just have to twiddle some buttons and
some magical quantum things will come out.
Or it could be to,
like,
higher level programming languages that people could use
to create their own,
quantum software.
As for how many employees we have,
I don't know exactly.
I'd say 15 to 20 is a sort
of level where that we are at.
I see. And and are those people mostly
sort of quantum people, physicists,
engineers, or or do you also have,
I don't know, for for lack of a
better word,
creative people, musicians,
artists,
etcetera,
on your staff?
Yeah. Well, as a small company, it's good,
that if people can do multiple things at
once. So,
we would like to have people who are
quantum people and creative people.
But, yeah, we have a research division and
that's based, here in Basel in Switzerland,
where people come from
a a background
in quantum, but they also bring expertise from
various creative areas as well,
either with a
long standing passion for music or someone who,
has has made their own quantum educational board
games.
We have team members,
covering
a full spectrum here.
We also have
another office in London.
And in that office, we have more the
the engineers, and those engineers are are usually
from creative backgrounds. So we have one engineer
who's just finished her master's degree,
at, the University of Arts London,
but is, deep in the code of of
quantum computing as well.
I see. So, James, before we we sort
of focus in on some of the projects
that you're working on at Moth, Can you
give us a a broad stroke
description of why quantum computing technologies
can be useful for creating music,
video games, visual art?
Yeah. Sure.
I think this is probably a question people
asked at the beginning of computing as a
whole, why people might wanna apply it to
creativity. But, actually,
games and music were some of the first
things that people experimented with.
Because the creative space is such a a
large one, there are so many computational problems,
that one could try to tackle.
And so quantum computers coming and bringing their
unique ability to solve certain kinds of problems,
it's inevitable that we'll find problems within the
creative space
that,
are relevant for that. But also, quantum has
also always been something that is inspirational for
people.
And so there's also the aspect that it's
quantum as inspiration,
as something that people can can use to
get sort of new insights. And so this
is actually one thing that's really exciting about
working in this area
is that you're not searching for
a specific right answer as you are when
you are doing quantum chemistry and trying to
calculate an energy
or doing,
factoring and trying to calculate factors.
There is
a realm
before that in which it's just
exploring the new technology and what it can
do
and finding unique insights from that.
And procedural
generation
for games,
That's one of the targets,
that you have for quantum computing. What is
procedural
generation,
and how could it benefit from a quantum
computing approach?
Yeah. So procedural generation is the algorithmic
generation of content for things like games.
Although it could also include things for other
areas, as well, such as in CGI,
just,
generating
textures is used to make,
things less plasticky sometimes.
But, I think of it mostly as its
application in games, and there is generating content,
which could be,
levels. It could be story lines. It could
be,
characters. It could be all kinds of things.
And, this differs from the current generative AI
where you just, you know, you throw a
million pictures of of cats and dogs
into,
an AI technology and it will eventually learn
what a cat is, And it might then
be able to generate new cats. But in
procedural generation, it's more handmade. It's more tailored.
You have to understand what it is you
are generating.
You have to know the rules.
And then the task is to try and
generate something as new and as unique,
within
those constraints,
as you can,
while satisfying
those rules.
And so, essentially, it's
it's a problem as constraint satisfiability.
You have certain constraints, and you you want
to find something that satisfies them while
exploring the possibility space as much as possible.
And this is is very hard because,
constraint satisfiability
problems are hard
to solve.
So people do it in different ways.
But because of that, they sometimes roll run
into what's called the 10,000 bowls of oatmeal
problem, where you have a generator
that is technically generating something very unique every
time, but just not doing it in a
way that people perceptually
care about. Just as every bowl of porridge
is unique,
but no one cares about the difference
between today's and yesterday's. It's all the same.
So having ways to really drive at the
constraints of the liability problems and the optimization
problems, well, are now new tools to help
people who are building these generative systems.
I see. And, you know, the fact that
quantum mechanics is all about,
probability
and and correlations,
does that does that sort of help? I
mean, I I think I might be getting
a bit sort of quantum woo y here,
but I'm sort of thinking of, you know,
the multiverse
in a game, and, you know, allowing quantum
states
to
evolve.
Am I sort of out to lunch on
that or is there something
is there something there?
Yeah. There was, an app a few actually
probably about ten years ago called Universe Splitter,
which,
took,
photons from Eddy Quantic,
and measured them in one or the other,
basis. And and you use that as a
as a decision maker. So you would put
in, shall I have pizza tonight or not?
And then you would get the universe splitter
to do it. And it's quite, like, quite
the most narrative there that in theory, if
you believe in the in the many world
interpretation, then in the other universe, you're having
pizza, but in this universe, you're not.
So there's there's things that people could be
inspired by in this area. But for me,
the probabilities
are more of a nuisance than they are
a help because I think people
often think of procedure generation as something very
random even though you have to put a
lot of effort into
into constraining it. And you often do it
in a seeded way. So you with a
definite seed, you produce a definite outcome.
So the randomness of quantum is not necessarily
a good thing. I much prefer when running
circuits to be calculating expectation values
and therefore be to be getting the nice,
solid, predictable things
rather than,
relying on the randomness. That's not really what
we wanna do. I see. Okay.
And,
using artificial intelligence for generating characters in games
is another quantum application that, that the company's
interested in. Why would quantum
AI be better than conventional
AI for character generation?
And and maybe you can start,
by I mean, could you give us a
taste of what what does character generation mean
in a in a game?
Yeah.
Well, it's essentially, one can think of it
as another part of procedural generation, and indeed
people often think of procedural generation as a
branch of AI.
So it's just a continuation in some ways
of what I said before.
For characters, it could be from things like
just generating
what the character looks like.
But,
maybe more pertinent for this question is
is broader things like the, the storyline
of a game. So you might be generating
a game and that game has
a narrative.
And,
and then you can procedurally generate
that
narrative.
And for that,
you need to have some way of encoding
the narrative. Like with any procedure generation, you
need to know what you're generating
to,
encode everything in the right way in your
generator.
And so one can ask the question,
what kinds of information
are more
naturally
encoded
in quantum systems
than
in classical systems in bits? And, of course,
we know
completely obvious that quantum states are more naturally
encoded in quantum systems.
You know, it's much easier to make a
superposition
than it is to write down all of
the coefficients
in binary.
But that doesn't mean it's just restricted to,
quantum physics. There's also,
evidence that other kinds of information are more
naturally
encoded in quantum systems as well.
And one
that, some of our,
some people
at, Continuum have been looking at is natural
language processing, particularly using this framework called Discocat.
So this is
a way of showing that, the kinds of
mathematical structures that are good for
encoding quantum states
are also good for encoding
the kinds of structures, the grammatical structures
that you get in in natural language.
And grammar is something that also,
exists beyond language. So you can use ideas
from grammar to kind of
if you think of the the narrative of
a game as
essentially a very large sentence in which all
other of sentences in the game were just
subsets on. That that structure can also be
expressed grammatically
and other things in procedural gen generation. So
the idea of grammars
is something that even in the classical world
is is very important in procedural generation.
And so, we can help
port some of those insights
from,
things like natural language processing
over to procedure generation and also music.
I see. And and and so is the
is the idea here that using a quantum
system, it will give you
a computational
advantage in the sense that you'll be able
to,
you know, compute,
the things that you need for a game,
much more quickly than a conventional com computer
or even a conventional
computer couldn't make those
calculations? Or or is it more of a,
sort of, a quality thing in the sense
that,
the stuff that you can get out of
a quantum
calculation is more
realistic or more desirable
to users, or or maybe it's a bit
of both?
Well, absolutely, it's a bit of both.
And also I think it depends
when we're talking
because,
so we
we believe that a quantum advantage will come
when we have fault tolerant quantum computers, and
we don't rule out the idea that a
quantum advantage will come before then.
But we also are definitely not betting on
it. So a quantum advantage being a time
when a quantum computer can do can solve
problems
that
conventional digital computers could not.
So
yeah, we we want to have things that
are based on concrete speed ups. We want
to be solving
problems that are useful for the creative industries
in ways that are are faster or more
accurately, really, quantum computers aren't about speeding up
things that already,
run at a decent rate. They're about
speeding up problems that we would currently not
even think about. And therefore,
we we'll be able to we're able to
get new tools,
that we wouldn't have had before. So having
those,
computational speed ups is very important, but that's
for the fault tolerant era. So we're planning
towards that, but we don't plan to deploy
any products with computational advantage
anytime soon.
Within the NIST era, we have devices. We
can use them.
And for that, it is more about
creating something that is,
unique. And so it's more about the quality
of the results
than than anything else. So if we for
example, one thing that we are quite interested
in is looking at simulations of quantum time
evolution
because this is something that quantum computers are
very good at. It's one of the things
that quantum computers are naturally good at, so
we we can see good results in the
NISC era. It's something that a lot of
companies are looking at for its advantages in
in health care and material design.
So, there's gonna be
quantum computers and quantum software dedicated to that.
Now how can
we use that in the creative industries?
And,
well, just as a very
hand wave of the explanation,
physics is is very important in all of
the creative industries.
Musical instruments
are physics. They are, you know, the the
waveforms,
that they are creating is all due
to the physics of of
vibration of strings, of of how it affects
the,
the air.
In in games, you use simulations of physics
in order to implement,
certain game mechanics. A lot
of a lot of games are based around,
the
how things fall and how things
move.
So physics is very important within game engines.
And in fact, game engines are often used
outside the game industry
because of how good they are at physics.
I was at a games conference recently where
there was a talk by people who worked
from one of the formula one teams
on how they
simulate the tracks for the for the players
to practice on. So, I think,
physics and visual media is also interesting. You
get a lot of
artists now who are producing digital media, producing
things like animations,
and these
are using some sort of simulation of physics
as well. So then the idea is, well,
what about quantum physics? And in fact, in
some of our artistic collaborations so far, they
have been using ideas and simulations from quantum
physics to generate
things that they find very inspirational.
I made a thing called Quantum Blurb back
in my time at IBM,
which,
was it it basically intended
as a
a toy to for people to play within
hackathons.
Because coming back to my hatred of, quantum
randomness,
I found that when
there were quantum game jams,
then often people who had no idea about
quantum would come to the quantum game jam
with the idea of making a game and
learning something about quantum.
This is what people often do at game
jams. They make a game over a short
amount of time and use it as an
opportunity to learn some new piece of programming
that they haven't done before. So they came
to learn quantum,
but as far as they got into quantum
was learning that if you do a Hadamard
and then a measurement
in a quantum circuit, then you get a
random number generator.
They made the random number generator,
and then they made a game around it,
which was entirely non quantum.
So I thought it's good to help people
start off not at the ground level, but
at something a little bit more sophisticated by
giving them a tool that does
something.
So I made this thing based on simulations
of essentially simulations of quantum time evolution,
that could be used to generate the kind
of textures that you can use in very
simple terrain generation,
in procedural generation.
And this was picked up by an artist
who has now been using it as his
main tool of expression for the last five
years, and he tells me that he could
keep on going until he dies
just
basing his art on on quantum blur.
So,
yeah, it's really become the
the quality of the output is is what
is important to him. He finds it inspirational,
and this is something that we see with
other artists as well, not just in visual
media, but also
in in in, music as well.
I see. So so the company's interest in
in visual
art
goes beyond,
creating visuals for games.
You're you're working with artists. I mean, do
do you work with people in film and
television, for example,
to create,
visuals
for for those media, or is that is
that something possibly for the future?
So well, we're a young company, so we
have lots of plans and lots of contacts.
And,
we are actively
pursuing
those kinds of, activities at the moment.
But it's not not anything we've got
signed
up that I've got a a nice official
thing that I can, talk about it on
a podcast and provide.
I see. Well, we'll have to we'll have
to get you get you back to talk
about that. And finally, James, music is also
a a a very big,
target, I suppose, for MOTH. Company's
very active in
developing,
something called AKTIA. Did I say that right?
AkTIA? It's AKTIAUS as an s. AKTIAUS.
Oh, sorry. AKTIAUS.
And that's a quantum
synthesizer and sound controller.
Can you can you talk about that? How
does it use quantum physics to make music?
Yeah.
So well,
the names of all of our products.
So this is maybe one thing just to
take an aside to to emphasize.
Yeah. We we are a company that wants
to be building products based on quantum computing.
Even though we don't think a quantum advantage
is necessarily coming into a fault tolerance,
we can still be
building products,
in the meantime.
And so Acteus is kind of step zero,
you might say, because it's entirely based around,
simulations of of of quantum.
So you're emulating a quantum computer rather than
actually running on a quantum computer.
And it's essentially,
you could think of it as an educational
tool or or a way of getting your
first taste of of quantum because it's basically
a block sphere that you plug into a
synthesizer.
So a block sphere is a representation of
a single,
qubit.
So, you know, for I've been talking maybe
throughout most of this assuming people know what
quantum computing is, but, of course, it's built
on the qubit, the the two level quantum
system.
And so,
this means that you can you have these
two number two complex values. You have these
restrictions of normalization,
which means that the mathematics
of a qubit
or just one qubit is essentially the same
as the mathematics
of a of a point on a sphere.
So there's this great jet, a visualization of
what's going on in a qubit with what's
going on in the point of a sphere.
On on the point of a sphere, you
have the x axis, the y axis, the
zed axis telling you where your
where your position is. So you could those
are three real numbers that you could plug
into various,
knobs and dials on a synthesizer.
So then you can be placing quantum gates
and seeing how that,
affects the point that you're at on the
block sphere.
So you look at the block sphere, you
get an idea,
from that visualization.
But, with
by plugging into a synthesizer, it also gives
you a way of sonifying it and giving
you maybe a bit more of a hands
on experience of what happens when you put
those quantum gates in.
Yeah. So that's that's what we're doing
with,
Actias.
But also another thing that we have out
currently is our quantum audio package. So this
is a Python package, and it's it's also
music based.
It's it's taking a few different ways that
people over time have proposed encoding music
in quantum systems
and also taken a few different ways that
people have proposed,
encoding
images in quantum systems and then hacked them
to do music instead.
And then that gives you a way
of encoding music in quantum systems in a
in a more sophisticated way than in Actias,
but in also less of a a fun
hands on way.
I see. And and just in terms of,
you know, your customers,
how
would
I mean, you mentioned that you are simulating
quantum computers for for some of these applications,
but
would, you know, if you did have a
a quantum algorithm
that a customer was using to, I don't
know, generate material
for a
game, would they
would they then lease time on
on a on a quantum computer from a
hardware provider?
I'm you know, I'm just trying to understand
how, you you know, the the the whole
sort of ecosphere
of of the industry and how how you
would see that happening.
Yeah.
Yeah. So these these early things there in
the
or Actus at least is in the realms
of simulation, but everything that we build in
future, we want to be,
moving into actually running on hardware.
So so yeah, the infrastructure of that, how
does that work?
Well, one sort of dream I have in
some ways is that,
IBM Quantum offers everyone
ten minutes free access on their systems
per month. And so what would be great
is to build the software that people can
plug it into their IBM Quantum free access,
and use that and, you know, really use
those IBM quantum systems so much that they
they have to think about revisiting that policy.
So that that's that's the dream I have.
But,
more generally,
you know, one of the main sort of
the product of all products, the thing behind
everything is gonna be the the infrastructure, the
back end,
where,
all of our products point to this way
that we are handling all of the quantum
system. So the people
themselves
will not need to worry about,
how they're going to run it on a
quantum system, how they're gonna do the error
mitigation or error correction when the time comes.
They're not gonna need to worry
about which device they have to use or
which qubits on that device are the best
qubits.
All of that we'll take care of,
and they just have to come along and,
and use the product.
I see. And if you could, you know,
sort of gaze into your quantum crystal ball,
when I mean, when do you think I
mean, is that something that can happen now,
I mean, you know, in terms of
you or a customer
booking time on a on a quantum computer
and doing something useful.
Or is that something for five years in
the future or ten years in the future?
No. It's absolutely
now. I mean, we've got a reservation
for one of the QPUs tomorrow morning, for
example, where we are gonna run a bunch
of stuff.
But also,
it can be done at any time,
as long as you're willing to get in
the queue.
So, these things are already there. We can
very much run things on quantum computers now.
And in fact, our our forthcoming
projects,
which are based around quantum reservoir computing,
are much more solidly based around running it
on real quantum hardware.
There is a, secret demo
of our upcoming game that that is out
there in the world
if people can go and find it.
But,
once that goes beyond being a demo, it
will be something that,
could for example, we haven't figured out the
details yet, but it's it's it's gonna be
a a game in which levels are generated
procedurally,
and they'll be generated
on a quantum computer. So it might be,
for example, every day it refreshes.
And so every day we're running it on
a quantum computer to get the new level.
Right. Any any hints for our listeners about,
about about where they can find this demo?
Well, it,
if they're a 10 year old, they already
know.
Let's let's get it like that. Okay.
I'm sure we've got a few ten year
old listeners out there. And
if I can
if you can indulge me, James, just by
answering one more question.
It's the International Year of Quantum Science and
Technology.
And so whenever I interview somebody,
associated with quantum science and technology,
I'm asking them one question,
and that question is, what does quantum
physics
mean to you? So do do do you
think you could have a go
at answering that question? And, you know, you
can say anything. It doesn't Yeah. It doesn't
have to be technical. It can be personal
or whimsical. Or
Mhmm.
Well, I've been so deep in it for
a long time now. So it means just,
it's what I do every day. It's it's,
so it's my job, but it's also
my hobby, I suppose. The the reason I
got into
doing these kinds of things, looking at games
and art,
was because I wanted to supplement my my
job of quantum error correction
with things that were gonna be
more accessible to the general public. The the
first thing I ever did in this space
was in 2016 to make a citizen science
game.
And I think I've I had an article
in Physics World. It might have been about
that, but it if it wasn't about that,
it was on about one of its successes.
So, yeah, that's what it means to me.
It it's a job,
but it's also
a passion.
Oh, that's great, James. And I will put
a link to that article in the notes
for this podcast.
Thanks so much for joining me today, and,
best wishes to you and all your colleagues
at Moth for the future.
Thanks a lot. It's great to be here.
That was James Wootton of Moth Quantum.
It was one hundred years ago that Werner
Heisenberg formulated
matrix mechanics,
which provided an appealing mathematical
framework
for explaining the puzzling observations
of the quantum world.
Heisenberg's
inspiration came on the German island of Helgoland,
where he was seeking relief from his severe
allergies.
But what if Heisenberg
had never made the journey to Helgoland
in the first place?
In the latest episode of the Physics World
Stories podcast,
the writer, Kevlin Henney,
discusses his new flash fiction,
Heisenberg,
not in Helgoland.
It was written exclusively
for Physics World as part of the International
Year of Quantum Science and Technology.
The story spans two worlds,
the one we know
and an alternative reality
in which Heisenberg
never visits the island of Helgoland.
That episode
is hosted by Andrew Glester,
and you can listen to it on the
Physics World website
or at your favorite podcast provider.
Just look for the headline,
alternate quantum realities.
What if Heisenberg
stayed at home?