A Quantum Leap For Basketball
"Bracketology"
David Hutsul, a student, came up with the idea. Last year, its quantum Picks led surprisingly well against picks from other people in the lab.
"It's almost won," Susan Clark, a post-doctoral researcher who works with Hutsul. "It was kind of scary."
Both Hutsul and Clark are working in the laboratory of Chris Monroe, usually on problems that quantum computers and quantum building networks. You use the element ytterbium ions, a metal that is exactly in the middle of the periodic table. Everyday research in the laboratory for making connections between sub-microscopic objects over distances much longer than typical quantum interactions, such as dedicated a few feet instead of smaller than an atom.
When used to assist in picking basketball games, the team used a phenomenon known as superposition. They persuade the ytterbium ion to act a bit like a coin. In the way that tossing a fair coin yields a random result of heads or tails, superposition allows the physicists to the ion preparation for a 50-50 chance to end up in state A or state B. It is possible that on the way a base coin have flipped that the result is not always truly random. But with quantum phenomena in which the position or state of an object based on likelihood of the result is truly random.
by: Ahmed Fadell