Sebastian Hassinger: 00:30

Today's episode marks my guest's second appearance on the podcast, having first appeared on episode two to discuss quantum error correction with us. James and I first worked together at IBM Quantum, and he has now joined Moth Quantum as their chief science officer, or as he put it, Spock. James' approach to quantum computing has always been very creative, and he's made it a personal mission to try to find ways to make the topic more accessible. I played the iOS game Hello Quantum on my iPhone before I knew James was the creator behind it, and I remember being sort of floored by the idea that this incredibly esoteric field could be used in creative ways and for creative endeavors. I really think that's an an incredibly important aspect of the development of the technology overall is to make it more rooted in sort of cultural activities.

Sebastian Hassinger: 01:20

I think that's a thing that happens as things move from very niche into the mainstream, and it's a really vital part of of it, what we need to do in the quantum computing field. I was really delighted when I found out that James was at the APS Global Summit and even more delighted when he agreed to sit down with me to record an episode. So thanks once again to the American Physical Society for the space to record while I was there. And now let's get to my conversation with James Boot. Two t's, no e's.

James Wootton: 02:09

Thank you for having me.

Sebastian Hassinger: 02:10

Good to see you again. I'm so, yeah, again, exactly. Long time listeners will remember that you were, on the the podcast probably probably in the first ten, somewhere in the single digits episodes, I think.

James Wootton: 02:23

I think I looked it up the other day. I think it was episode two of

Sebastian Hassinger: 02:26

Oh, really? Oh, it was that early. Wow. Okay. Wow.

Sebastian Hassinger: 02:30

I know I I think we talked about quantum error correction at the time because you have been my go to resource to explain the hard math for quite some time now. We were both at IBM at the time when I started the podcast, I think, or I just left, but you were still at IBM. We knew each other when we were, both at IBM. And I just wanted to have you on again because I think, you know, you've now left IBM. You've you've joined a a new company, which is in some ways, in my mind, the role you're playing is sort of and the company you've joined is sort of closer to what you've been interested in sort of from the very beginning, which is Mhmm.

Sebastian Hassinger: 03:09

A somewhat unconventional take on what, quantum computing might be used for. So how about you tell us about that?

James Wootton: 03:17

Okay. Yeah. So I suppose the origin story, if we go all the way back, begins in the same place as the origin story of quantum mechanics itself a hundred years ago. So I was in Arosa, which is a ski resort in Switzerland, and that's where Schrodinger came up with the Wave Equation.

Sebastian Hassinger: 03:36

Oh, really?

James Wootton: 03:37

Wow. Which I think is part of the motivation that we used to have this annual meeting there Right. Of our of our certain of our consortium Yeah. For funding in Switzerland. And I was asked by the technology transfer officer if the research I do could form a company.

James Wootton: 03:56

And I found it so laughable. I think I did actually laugh in her face. But it got me thinking, especially at the time when I would do simulations of quantum error correction, I would think of a distance 10 code as being a small code.

Sebastian Hassinger: 04:12

Right.

James Wootton: 04:12

So that's like 200 qubits and I'd be thinking, not enough. Yeah. Whereas if you look at what was going on in hardware at the time, it was something like five qubits was the absolute bleeding

Sebastian Hassinger: 04:23

We were stuck at five for a long time too.

James Wootton: 04:25

Yeah. And to do anything with that qubit, would have to convince an experimental group to dedicate a PhD student to give a year of their PhD to running your thing. So it really wasn't what we were imagining as being quantum computing.

Sebastian Hassinger: 04:42

Right.

James Wootton: 04:44

So that led to a bit of a lack of motivation and the idea that this was all sci fi. And it wasn't really giving anything back to the taxpayer who was actually paying for all this. At that conference

Sebastian Hassinger: 04:56

He's very civic minded up here.

James Wootton: 04:57

Yes, thank you. So at that conference I came up with this idea of making a puzzle game out of my research, Because there's certain areas of quantum error correction that you can build really complex, fancy, optimized decoders that do the best that you could ever possibly do, but there are other aspects of quantum error correction where heuristics are about as good as you can do. So we could turn that into a puzzle game, give it to the public, and they might come up with the best decoder. Gamifying quantum error correction. Yeah.

James Wootton: 05:33

Exactly. Yeah. So I did that. I called it Decodoku. Right.

James Wootton: 05:36

Which is still my handle. Yes. It is. Social media.

Sebastian Hassinger: 05:39

Thank you for solving that puzzle for me.

James Wootton: 05:42

Yeah. So it's, decode because it's decoder, and Sudoku is what I combined together to form that name. So, yeah, that was 2016. I got some money from the funding body to specifically focus on creating that game, doing lots of outreach around it. And that was the same year that IBM put five qubits on the cloud.

James Wootton: 06:05

So suddenly, it became not so sci fi anymore. Right. It became much more tangible. That was quite

Sebastian Hassinger: 06:12

the moment, wasn't it? Yeah. Really, I mean, my intersection with Quantum was shortly thereafter because they'd asked for help with essentially the, the open source development community strategy, and I was doing that sort of work at IBM at the time. So I I ended up, sort of serendipitously attending a Quantum Summit shortly after that that initial launch. It was, that that everything else since then has been based on that that one, happy accident.

James Wootton: 06:41

Yeah. So I think the first time I heard of it, I I actually undervalued it a bit. Someone told me they'd put five cubits on the cloud, and I was just five cubits, whatever. Because it wasn't the 200 that I already decided was too little. But I had put out a paper the year before where I had proposed an experiment with five qubits.

James Wootton: 07:04

I'd said, oh, you could do this big fancy thing, but if you want the minimal version, it takes five qubits. So I proposed that experiment. And a month or so later after I heard about the IBM thing, I was thinking, oh, I wonder if I can get someone to run that experiment. Which which experimental group can I convince to dedicate a PhD to do this? And then I suddenly realized, hang on, five five cubits?

James Wootton: 07:28

That's what IBM have put up. And then by the end of the day, I had done the experiment. So it really just showed what a paradigm shift Yeah. It was.

Sebastian Hassinger: 07:40

As you said, you didn't have to convince somebody to dedicate a year of a PhD student's time to do the experiment. That's quite a delta from from one year of somebody else's labor to one day of your own. Yeah.

James Wootton: 07:54

Well, I realized it's at lunch, so it was only half a day. Okay. Good. And by the end of the week, I'd read the paper, so it's pretty amazing. And because I was in this mode of of outreach, then I didn't just write paper.

James Wootton: 08:08

I wrote blog posts about it, did a YouTube video. I don't look at those old YouTube videos. They're they're not great. What else did I yeah. So and I also started thinking because I had this games mindset.

James Wootton: 08:21

Right. Well, can I run some simple games on this device? What what kind of games would fit? What would make sense? And typically, I was doing it from a also from an outreach perspective because you're not gonna get any new and unique gameplay running on five cubits, but maybe you can do it in such a way that at least you can write a blog about Right.

James Wootton: 08:44

The game you've made. And then you can start explaining Right. Some of the building

Sebastian Hassinger: 08:47

blocks blocks Similar kind of rationale behind DekuDoku. I mean, similar sort of it was the the game is helping illustrate the concepts.

James Wootton: 08:55

Yeah. Yeah. It's it's games doing something for quantum computing. So, yeah, I did some of those, so I think I I hold the record of the the first quantum game. What I there's a game called Universe Splitter based the the uses Ides QuanTig's which you could say is the the first quantum game Right.

James Wootton: 09:16

Because it's quantum. It's and it's kind of a game. What I so I do the first quantum computing game.

Sebastian Hassinger: 09:23

Okay. Good. Good. Good. Good.

Sebastian Hassinger: 09:26

I mean, qualifications are fine as long as you can claim a first title.

James Wootton: 09:30

Yeah. Well, I'm always annoyed by firsts because everyone's always saying, although that first didn't count. Right. This is a first year first.

Sebastian Hassinger: 09:37

Yeah.

James Wootton: 09:38

I was joking with the Quantum Realms games guys the other day because they've made Quantum Chess. Yes. And that's a commercial game. You can buy it on Steam. Yeah.

James Wootton: 09:47

Go and buy it now.

Sebastian Hassinger: 09:49

Yeah.

James Wootton: 09:49

And they've also run it on Quantum hardware

Sebastian Hassinger: 09:52

Right.

James Wootton: 09:52

As part of these demos. It was in Q2B a few years ago. Yeah. So they claim, and it's a good claim, that they have the first commercial game that runs on a Quantum computer.

Sebastian Hassinger: 10:02

Yeah.

James Wootton: 10:04

And I was, like, joking, well, we're gonna come up with one that actually runs while you're playing it. So that we're gonna claim this

Sebastian Hassinger: 10:09

is the first commercial real time quantum computer.

James Wootton: 10:12

The real one doesn't count. But really, first, the thing is it's what you've done that's impressive. And they did something that's impressive.

Sebastian Hassinger: 10:19

It is.

James Wootton: 10:19

And we're gonna do things that are impressive. Yeah. So can.

Sebastian Hassinger: 10:23

There's there's no need fighting over

James Wootton: 10:24

it. Yeah. Yeah. So that that got me into the games and the outreach and the using IBM stuff. So then I went to IBM.

James Wootton: 10:37

Actually, the last time was at the March meeting, which is where we are now, which was in LA, which is basically where we are now. Yeah. And so the last so yeah. After I'd done all that outreach and come up with a gay these games and used these quantum computers of IBM, I went to IBM and said, do got do you got any jobs? Wanting to continue doing this.

James Wootton: 11:02

Right. Because above all, I had that year where I could unashamedly do this kind of stuff, but that year had ended, so I had to go back to doing proper work again. And it would be good to join IBM and be able to do that stuff. Right. Just out and out, do quantum and games and that kind of thing.

James Wootton: 11:23

Which, because I was in the community team, as it was then, I was able to do this, to focus on education, to write the Qiskit textbook. I collaborated with IBM even before I joined making an educational game called Hello Quantum. Right.

Sebastian Hassinger: 11:41

I played that. That was a mobile game.

James Wootton: 11:43

Yeah. Yeah. So I did various things like that. But after a while, I really wanted to look at the the other side of things. Not what can games do for quantum computers, but what can quantum computers do for games.

James Wootton: 11:58

Mhmm. And One of the first things I did in this was actually, it's kind of a bit of both really. I made a thing called Quantum Blur. And that was kind of motivated by the fact that there had been these quantum hackathons and quantum game jams. And sometimes, well quite often you would get people turn up to a quantum game jam who knew how to make games, but they knew nothing about And often people like game jams do come because they want to learn something new.

James Wootton: 12:28

They wanna learn a new game engine, they wanna learn some other new tool, so they're coming wanting to learn quantum. But it is quite a broad topic.

Sebastian Hassinger: 12:39

It is. Much as we And a steep learning curve.

James Wootton: 12:42

Yeah, much as we who do education about it like to say that there's ways in that are easier. Over the course of a weekend, to both learn quantum computing and make a game based on it is a bit of an arse. And what people would often do is discover that a high demand followed by a measurement is a random number generator. Right. And they know how to make a game that has a random number generator in So that would be their quantum game.

James Wootton: 13:11

Right. As quantum is universe splitter, which is not quantum enough. Yeah. I wanted to allow people to hit the ground running, so I made this thing which is, you can think of it as a way to encode images in quantum states such that you can then slap down some gates and then see what effect these have to the image. So you don't need to know what the quantum gates are or how they combine before doing this, because you can just do it sort of intuitively, try some things, twiddle some knobs.

Sebastian Hassinger: 13:47

I remember an image in maybe a blog post or something of sort of digits sort of fading in and out of each other. Is that is that quantum blur? That was a use of quantum blur.

James Wootton: 13:56

Yeah. I think so. Yeah. So, yeah, I also had this, like, a teleportation version where you encode two images and then you could fractional swap gates Right. Which would do a sort of cross fade effect.

Sebastian Hassinger: 14:09

I like the fact that you're tying it to something with visual feedback because that's, you know, for a lot of people, that's an easier sort of educational route than than the pure maths or the the logical operations. Right? If they're seeing what's happening as a a result of the gates they're opera they're they're applying

James Wootton: 14:27

Yeah.

Sebastian Hassinger: 14:27

They can sort of wrap their heads around it more easily.

James Wootton: 14:30

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So people were able to use that to do some interesting things. They're like KitKitKap Europe, we had a few games based on it.

James Wootton: 14:40

Other hackathons, we had games based on it as well. But also our motivation was that of procedural generation. Because I thought, what can games do for quantum computers? Sorry. Sorry.

James Wootton: 14:51

What can quantum computer do for games? And probably one of the most realistic applications is procedural generation.

Sebastian Hassinger: 14:57

Mhmm.

James Wootton: 14:58

Because this doesn't have to run every frame.

Sebastian Hassinger: 15:01

Right.

James Wootton: 15:01

Which is completely unrealistic. And you could also generate content for many players all at once if it's a massively multiplayer thing. So you're not reserving a lot of quantum computing time just for every single player. Right. So it's a kind of a realistic thing that you can do within the game's space.

Sebastian Hassinger: 15:20

And a very important sort of building block of of game game design, game development as well. Right? Yeah. It it's not a an easy thing to do classically. Not that you can't, but it's it's it's a relatively heavy lift depending on what you're trying to do procedural generation of.

Sebastian Hassinger: 15:39

So Yeah. It's it I mean, it makes a lot of sense. Definitely. Mhmm. And that's so that the first example I saw that was the sort of island generator.

Sebastian Hassinger: 15:49

Right? You're generating a a landscape, a gaming sort of world building, essentially. Yeah.

James Wootton: 15:56

Yeah. So procedural generation is a very wide church and on one end there's very difficult computational problems. But on the other end there's things that are a lot simpler. I found out that back in the 80s, of the first things that people used of the tool in procedure generation was just blurring, essentially. So they would put some random dots down, blur them, and then that would create a continuous landscape.

James Wootton: 16:25

Right. So part of my motivation behind making this quantum blur was also to make something that was like a blur effect, but also had quantum interference.

Sebastian Hassinger: 16:37

Right, right, right.

James Wootton: 16:38

And then we could use that same thing to do terrain generation, but quantum. So I was generating some quantum islands and rendering them in a Minecraft like Right. Game engine. Right. That at the time was called MindTest.

Sebastian Hassinger: 16:53

That's right. I think that still exists. It's an open source Yeah. Or clone of Minecraft that people use as a development environment or an open source sort of alternative to Minecraft. Right?

James Wootton: 17:03

Yeah. Yeah. They've renamed it in the last year. Oh, have they? Okay.

James Wootton: 17:06

But if you search MindTest, you'll still find

Sebastian Hassinger: 17:08

it. Yeah.

James Wootton: 17:09

Yeah. So I was creating some islands. One of them went in James Weaver's MindTest game Yes. KitKit blocks. Right.

James Wootton: 17:16

If you if you go and find that, there's a there's an island in the of the

Sebastian Hassinger: 17:20

James, he did all the work. I just sort of worked the crowd, made sure everybody was okay in a in a seminar with about 65 middle schoolers where he presented, Qiskit blocks, got them up and running. And it was really remarkable because these middle schoolers didn't I mean, you know, he sort of did, like, the polarized light demonstration and a couple of other sort of contextual introductions of quantum and then set them loose on this level, this Minecraft level. And they went like, oh, Minecraft. I know how to do this.

Sebastian Hassinger: 17:51

And they you know, the first kid who finished it was, like, in forty five minutes or less. They just finished the entire thing. And there's this whole series of increasingly complex quantum circuits you have to build to solve these puzzles. And not once did any of them say, look, this is very nonintuitive. Right?

Sebastian Hassinger: 18:08

They just it was Minecraft. It was very familiar. So it's a it was a great example of how finding the right context for educational content can can suddenly unlock, you know, very frictionless kind of learning.

James Wootton: 18:21

Yeah. Also finding the right age of people. Yes. We found this with Hello Quantum as well. You give it to an adult and they decide immediately that this is too hard.

James Wootton: 18:32

Right. They'll do a few puzzles out of politeness and then say, oh, is not, it's too hard for me. Give it to a child, they just sit there for ten minutes and and complete the entire game. Right.

Sebastian Hassinger: 18:45

Yeah. I was just talking to Emily Edwards earlier this week and we I brought up something about nonintuitiveness or or know, quantum intuition being hard, she said the same thing. It's like, well, because we introduce quantum concepts, you know, in university, you know, generally, you've already got a formed classical intuition. And you have to sort of undo that work just to restructure it to have, you know, space for quantum concepts. So Yeah.

Sebastian Hassinger: 19:15

Definitely, age is is a or the the the age at which they they are introduced these concepts is super important.

James Wootton: 19:21

Mhmm. Yeah. So it was a bit of a landscape generation tool for a while, and then I well, I showed it to my manager at the time, and he seemed to like it, which is good if your manager

Sebastian Hassinger: 19:33

likes what you're And it's fun. Yeah. Double notice.

James Wootton: 19:38

And one of our our colleagues, Stefan Schneider, had gone out to a kind of science and art event and met a guy there who was working on the using AI as a as a muse in order to help him transition from being a classical painter to an abstract painter. So Stefan said, come to the lab, see what we're doing. And so I was put out to entertain him. So I showed him Quantum Blur and he seemed to like it. And five years later, he's been using it as his main artistic tool

Sebastian Hassinger: 20:19

That's really cool.

James Wootton: 20:19

For that whole time.

Sebastian Hassinger: 20:20

That's really cool. And does it run, on live IBM quantum computers, or is it, like, directly using Qiskit just to send circuits to real machines?

James Wootton: 20:31

So what it can do Yeah. But because it was designed as a more educational tool, you wanna remove the barriers, so running it on simulators makes it a lot easier. And you can also run it in weird places like on a little microcontroller, games consoles. So usually it runs on a simulator, but we have run it on hardware as well. We have a couple of papers on it, and the second one we show some of the pros and cons of real hardware.

James Wootton: 21:00

The trouble is because it was just designed as a simple tool, the first gate that is in the circuit is a preparation gate. It is the gate which says prepare this particular quantum circuit, which on a simulator, super easy

Sebastian Hassinger: 21:13

to do.

James Wootton: 21:15

But on real hardware, you've gotta take that and compile it down into actual gates and then try and run them without getting completely swamped by noise.

Sebastian Hassinger: 21:23

Right. Right. And how many qubits does, is sort of the minimal and what's largest number of qubits you've run quantum blur on?

James Wootton: 21:32

It can depend. Basically, the number of pixels you have in your image is the logarithm base two of that is how many you need. So I think it's something like 20 cubits.

Sebastian Hassinger: 21:44

You can get a really good HD image. That's cool. That's really great. And so that is now five or so years old. How is that that work from Quantum Blur, how's that been evolving?

Sebastian Hassinger: 21:58

And is that part of what you're doing now with Moth?

James Wootton: 22:02

Yeah. So well, Quantum Blur hasn't really had much development since then. It's it's a paintbrush Right. That's out, and Roman's been using it. And I've been looking at other ways that you might use procedural generation based on quantum computing.

James Wootton: 22:20

Some of that is using simulations of quantum time evolution or imaginary time evolution to do things that will be useful. Because you get these kind of evolving systems and also these, what are they called again, cellular automata used in Oh, cellular automata. Yeah. Okay. Used in procedural generation.

Sebastian Hassinger: 22:46

Right. So that That's interesting. Is it they have their roots in the very earliest days of classical computing.

James Wootton: 22:52

Yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting. So it's a good motivation to look at whether just interesting quantum dynamics can be used in procedural generation.

Sebastian Hassinger: 23:02

What is, if I may ask, so imaginary time evolution, what is imaginary about the time?

James Wootton: 23:09

Yeah. It's the weird thing about imaginary time evolution is it's the least imaginary time evolution. It's just that in the equation for time evolution, you've got this e to the I, you have Hamiltonian, and then t, And that is the equation for doing normal unitary dynamics, which doesn't drive down to the ground state of your Hamiltonian, it just processes around all of the energy states. But if you were to remove the I, then, so you're removing the imaginarian essentially, it means that you actually start driving down to the ground to get your Hamiltonian, which is non unitary dynamics, makes it harder to do. So you can think of it as removing the I or you can think of it as multiplying your time.

James Wootton: 23:57

So having the time not as a real number but as an imaginary number.

Sebastian Hassinger: 24:01

Okay. Okay.

James Wootton: 24:02

And then you get another I which comes and cancels

Sebastian Hassinger: 24:04

the first Gotcha. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. So okay.

Sebastian Hassinger: 24:08

So how would, how would that sort of, enhance or or, augment or evolve the idea behind quantum blur? Is that a totally separate the quantum

James Wootton: 24:18

Yes.

Sebastian Hassinger: 24:18

Imaginary time evolution?

James Wootton: 24:20

Yeah. It's quite separate. Okay. Yeah. So I had a a paper a few years ago, which I never use the phrase imaginary time evolution in the paper, but it's the way I sort of conceptualize it now, which is that you've got a bunch of AIs playing a civilization like game against each other.

James Wootton: 24:40

And this is used for geopolitical map generation. You don't think of it as a game in itself. And all of those AIs are controlled by a qubit essentially. So you have a bunch of expectation values that you measure and depending on the values of those, you choose a certain strategy for the next move. And so they all make their moves, that leads to consequences in the game world, and then based on those consequences, they should change their And so the way it's done is that you kind of have a Hamiltonian for each of these cuebits and their interactions, which guides what they're currently doing.

James Wootton: 25:23

But if their strategy should change, then you change that Hamiltonian. So you change the Hamiltonian, you apply a bit more imaginary time evolution to push down to the ground state of the new Hamiltonian. And then you're getting this dialogue between the classical dynamics of the game and the quantum dynamics.

Sebastian Hassinger: 25:39

So is the idea that over time the the AI should evolve a more effective strategic response to the gameplay?

James Wootton: 25:50

Yes. So it the idea is that they will respond. Yeah. So when you say more, more than Yes. If you're saying more than classical, no.

Sebastian Hassinger: 25:58

No. But, I mean, I I I mean, the system as a whole is trying to evolve towards a more effective strategy.

James Wootton: 26:04

Yeah. Yeah. So it should seem like it is responding intelligently. Mhmm. You know, not, like, sentiently,

Sebastian Hassinger: 26:12

but No. No. Yeah.

James Wootton: 26:12

In some way intelligently to the to what's going on in the in the gameplay.

Sebastian Hassinger: 26:18

So would this be something that potentially could be NPCs or, like, you know, simulating human, opponents or, well, bot opponents for a human player?

James Wootton: 26:29

Yeah. So in this case, it was more that you you run the game Run the whole game. Right. To create the map. And Oh, I see.

James Wootton: 26:36

I some games, you will you'll create a a world in which you're gonna play the game.

Sebastian Hassinger: 26:41

Right.

James Wootton: 26:42

And so it well, it doesn't just create the map. It creates a whole history behind it.

Sebastian Hassinger: 26:45

Got it. Okay. So it's like a world like, procedural generation as world building, essentially. Yeah. With actual, like, evolution of the map instead of just pure generation out of nothing.

Sebastian Hassinger: 26:58

Yeah. That's really interesting. It's almost agentic.

James Wootton: 27:01

Yeah. I was thinking of a version where one of the players will is played by a human. Mhmm. I was wanting to run that on real hardware, And I was thinking of doing it via a Twitter bot. So the Twitter bot would tweet out the map and then people could reply to suggest the next move.

Sebastian Hassinger: 27:18

Well, Blue Sky now.

James Wootton: 27:20

Yeah. So maybe I will revive Yeah. For Blue Sky. But, yeah, the that was about the time that Twitter bots Right. Became a lot harder to to create.

James Wootton: 27:32

Right. Even ones that are out and out Twitter bots, we admit being a Twitter bot Right. That the whole point you would follow this is because you you like the Twitter bot. Right. Right.

James Wootton: 27:43

But, yeah, they didn't really go anywhere. Yeah. Well, I

Sebastian Hassinger: 27:46

think blue sky is a pretty open development environment, so that might be worth revisiting. So okay. So I've skirt I've already mentioned this, but you have now left IBM. You joined Moth Quantum, which is a startup, building quantum software. Yeah.

Sebastian Hassinger: 28:02

You're bringing this sort of, line of thinking and theme of, quantum for not just gameplay, but creativity in general, I think. Is that right?

James Wootton: 28:14

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I had also gone beyond games a little bit because I was collaborating with Romance, so that's visual art. And we had been looking also at whether we could use DiscoCat, which is this framework developed by people at Continuum Right.

James Wootton: 28:33

To do language generation Right. Right. Generating sentences.

Sebastian Hassinger: 28:37

That's that's Bob Coke, think, is yeah. Yeah. Yeah. CX calculus Yeah. And language generation.

James Wootton: 28:43

Yeah. But that's any kind of grammar any kind of data structure based around grammar. So you can also do it on music. Right. We also did a bit of music generation in it.

Sebastian Hassinger: 28:51

Very cool.

James Wootton: 28:52

But that's something that other people, especially Eduardo Miranda Right. At Plymouth has been doing a lot of.

Sebastian Hassinger: 28:58

Yeah.

James Wootton: 28:59

So based on what I was doing in games and what other people were doing in other areas, there was this idea to create a company. So this company was created called Moth, and once they'd secured some funding, they had already reached out Right. Prepared me Yes. For the very constant The knock on door. Yeah.

James Wootton: 29:24

Before they had got any funding. But, you know, people say things all the time. Of course. But then then I got the knock on the door. Yeah.

James Wootton: 29:34

And, yeah, they said, come and join us. Be our chief science officer. And I was like, oh,

Sebastian Hassinger: 29:40

yeah.

James Wootton: 29:40

Like Spock. And, yeah, I like

Sebastian Hassinger: 29:45

You have far too many emotions, James, to be like Spock. Yeah. You wouldn't be creative if you

James Wootton: 29:51

were like Spock. Think I'm a Romulan.

Sebastian Hassinger: 29:54

Oh, that's probably true.

James Wootton: 29:55

Yeah. Still got the pointy ears. Yeah. Exactly. I'm looking at you.

Sebastian Hassinger: 29:58

You're clearly a Romulan,

James Wootton: 30:00

James. So, yeah, I asked them what the plan was, and they they tell me the plan. And it's like, what? You just stole this from all my papers

Sebastian Hassinger: 30:10

and talks, didn't you? That's the highest form of flattery, though.

James Wootton: 30:16

Yeah. So so I I founded a company without even knowing.

Sebastian Hassinger: 30:19

That is nice. That's an efficient, process.

James Wootton: 30:22

Yeah. Like

Sebastian Hassinger: 30:23

do that myself someday.

James Wootton: 30:25

So I find signed up, and, here I am.

Sebastian Hassinger: 30:28

That's great. That's great. So okay. So, it's it's quantum computing for creative tools. Is that is that fair to say that's what the sort of mission statement would be?

James Wootton: 30:40

Yeah. So we wanna bring quantum computing to the creative industries. So you can think of that maybe in the long term, that means being the backend, the quantum computing infrastructure, anything that would be done by Hollywood, by Sony, and so on. But in the near term, we're not gonna be able to do anything with a quantum advantage in the next few years. But the nice thing about the creative industries is that usefulness means something different.

James Wootton: 31:13

I mean, there are applications in the creative industries where you you need definite answers to definite problems just like you do in quantum chemistry and Sometimes you just need a blur. Yeah. But there are also applications where where usefulness is just bringing something unique.

Sebastian Hassinger: 31:31

Right. That's what I found super interesting about your your approach right from the very when we first met. It was just or actually before, because I knew your work before I met you. It is that it it is finding this interesting corner that I think is overlooked where, as you said, it's for creative purposes. You don't need a a superior solution.

Sebastian Hassinger: 31:53

You need something that's sort of opening up possibilities that are, you know, not about performance, not about exactitude, not about speed, but about sort of an oblique approach to something. Right? Something that's unexpected or aesthetically pleasing or whatever. Right? It's much more about the uniqueness than than about the the the bestness, I guess.

James Wootton: 32:20

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. There there's still some challenges over exactitude and speed Sure. Just to make it usable.

James Wootton: 32:27

And that's another great motivation for the fact that we can deploy products even now that people find useful, and we can learn all of the lessons as what it means to build a product on top of quantum computing already. Build up that expertise so that when it comes to age where we can actually provide quantum advantages, which I think will be when fault tolerance comes from, then we already have a lot of experience.

Sebastian Hassinger: 32:54

And you have the possibility

James Wootton: 32:55

of

Sebastian Hassinger: 32:55

exposing people in industries which are frankly not being thought of as being potential end users of quantum technologies today. I mean, I don't think there's anybody else out there who's got the media industry in their in their, focus area because they're thinking about, you know, physical, like chemical processes, materials. Maybe they're thinking about financial or pharmaceutical applications, but all of those are much more industrial and certainly not something that's interesting to a media company that's making films or music or other other cultural content. So I think it's really, really exciting, and I'm really looking forward to what you guys are gonna be doing in the in the near future. Yeah.

Sebastian Hassinger: 33:38

Thank you. Thanks for joining us. This has been really great. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Sebastian Hassinger: 33:43

My pleasure. That's it for another episode of the new quantum era. Thanks to James Wooten for joining us for a great conversation. The podcast is a production of The New Quantum Era, hosted by me, Sebastian Hassinger, with theme music by Omar Costa Hamido. You can find past episodes on www.newquantumera.com or on blue sky at newquantumera.com.

Sebastian Hassinger: 34:10

If you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and tell your quantum curious friends to give it a lesson.