Quantum Particle Golf
See weird quantum effects while playing golf at the subatomic scale.
David Kamensky
(dmk)
Gameplay and controls: The golf ball is now a wave (the white squiggly line) and only collapses into one place when you measure it's position (press space bar). It's likelihood of being measured in different places is related to the wave's amplitude in those places. You can change these likelihoods by pushing the ball's wave around with your golf club: a potential barrier (grey bar) whose height (up and down arrows) and position (left and right arrows) you can control. Try to measure the ball inside the hole (green area) with the fewest number of swings (measurements). When you get the ball into the hole, the hole will be randomly relocated.
Technical stuff: The white line displayed is the real part of the ball's complex wavefunction. I used a simple finite difference method to evolve the wavefunction over time (according to the Schrodinger equation). My back-of-the-envelope stability analysis consisted only of "make the timesteps really small", so there may exist reachable configurations where the scheme becomes numerically unstable. If your computer is too slow, the program will use longer timesteps and may behave erratically, but it runs fine on my (old) hardware. I have only tested this program on Ubuntu Linux, but I'm guessing that it will run unaltered on most platforms.
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Releases
Quantum Particle Golf 0.1 — 26 Jul, 2011