If you struggle with Wordle, you might just need to think like a quantum computer. Quantum algorithms will always do better at the game and other similar ones than their classical counterparts in the long run.
at Sun Yat-sen University in China and his colleagues developed a quantum algorithm for the game Mastermind, which has many of the same underlying principles as Wordle.
In the game, a 鈥渃odemaker鈥� chooses four pegs, each of which can be one of six colours, and arranges them in a pattern. The 鈥渃odebreaker鈥� then uses a series of guesses to determine the arrangement of the pegs. In Wordle, the setup is very similar except that the codebreaker has to guess a five-letter word rather than a pattern of coloured pegs.
Advertisement
Li and the team based their quantum Mastermind strategy on a well-known quantum codebreaking algorithm that has previously been used in real-world cryptography. It relies on the idea of quantum superposition where the many possibilities of how something can exist are expressed by one mathematical function. Consequently, the codebreaker can very efficiently make many guesses at once.
鈥淥ur work shows the Wordle game can also be more easily won on quantum computers,鈥� says Li.
at the University of California San Diego says that though physicists and computer scientists have known that quantum algorithms may excel in situations where information is uncovered through a sequence of guesses, the new result shows how this works in a specific situation.
鈥淐oncrete applications of quantum algorithms are sort of few and far between,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 nice to see a quantum algorithm where there are real problems that they can really be better for.鈥�
However, existing quantum computers are too small and error-prone to be able to implement the algorithm from the new study, says at the University of Lisbon in Portugal.
Li鈥檚 team plans to expand on the algorithm to make it more resilient to such errors and identify other codebreaking or secret-learning problems where the quantum approach may be advantageous.
Reference:
