Quantum Brownie(s) is a short excerpt from The Quantum Cooking Recipe Collection (2022). This project is part of research conducted by Parsons School of Design (The New School), NY, and IBM Quantum in October 2022. This was our team’s brainchild created in one week from ideation to presentation.
Awarded: The Most Creative use of Quantum Technology in Visual Arts
A pursuit of mine is to make Quantum (computing, physics, theory, etc.) accessible and understandable to a wider general audience. Quantum computing is an approaching technological revolution that is going to change the world forever, and most people have no idea what it is.
An example of the power and reach that quantum computing will have is that there
are 10^48 possible states of a caffeine molecule and simulating that is not possible with even the most powerful supercomputers. For quantum computers, it only takes 160 qubits. This was not possible a few years ago, but IBM just unveiled their newest processor
‘Osprey’ with 433 qubits.
We know applications of simulating molecules and other scientific pursuits would affect medicine, disease, economy, etc. but our team decided to think about how this could affect the everyday.
We came across new avenues of research suggesting the simulation of physical properties like the
smell and taste of molecules are being looked into. We proposed Quantum Cooking as a means of generating truly random recipes that embrace noise, recipes with entangled ingredients to ideally balance out flavors, and simulating the taste of recipes that don’t (yet) exist.
What if you could taste the Sun? What if you could cook with asteroid dust? Quantum cooking might just let you.
These recipes are generated using IBM q-composer with access to IBM Quantum Computers. The Bernstein–Vazirani quantum algorithm was used to build a system that would create recipes. With the dataset generated by a 3-qubit circuit and 8 variables, a brownie recipe system with over
16.7 million possibilities was created. By embracing the noise of the data and by entertaining ideas of entanglement and superposition, The first ever Quantum Cooking Recipe Collection (2022) is born.
Once we built the generator, we had to use it of course.
Enjoy our Quantum Cooking case study cooking segment.