No dice: Quantum randomness may not be random

Antonio Costantino Marceddu, Nicola Dilillo, Marco Russo +2 more

In role-playing games (RPGs), players are called upon to assume the role of a character moving in an imaginary environment and facing several challenges. Their success or failure often depends on randomizers like cards or dice. Regarding the latter, the most commonly used in RPGs are the Platonic solids with the addition of the ten-sided die. They are commonly simulated through classical computers, however, since true randomness is not in their nature, they can only generate pseudorandom numbers. On the contrary, quantum computers exploit the nondeterministic nature of quantum mechanics, so they are perfect candidates for truly random simulations in games of chance. For this reason, this paper proposes and tests various quantum circuits for sampling uniformly distributed discrete values within a fixed range, corresponding to the number of faces of the dice. The simulations reveal the pure randomness of the output of the implemented circuits. They were then used to generate random numbers within a three-dimensional dice-rolling game.

George G. Szpiro

While one may argue about whether tosses of coins, throws of dice, rolls of roulette balls, twirlings of ping-pong balls are truly unbiased, unpredictable, uniformly distributed, most scientists agree – Albert Einstein’s reservations (“God does not play dice”) notwithstanding – that quantum phenomena are honest-to-goodness random.

Scott Aaronson

Vasil Dinev Penchev

Einstein wrote his famous sentence "God does not play dice with the universe" in a letter to Max Born in 1920. All experiments have confirmed that quantum mechanics is neither wrong nor “incomplete”. One can says that God does play dice with the universe. Let quantum mechanics be granted as the rules generalizing all results of playing some imaginary God’s dice. If that is the case, one can ask how God’s dice should look like. God’s dice turns out to be a qubit and thus having the shape of a unit ball. Any item in the universe as well the universe itself is both infinitely many rolls and a single roll of that dice for it has infinitely many “sides”. Thus both the smooth motion of classical physics and the discrete motion introduced in addition by quantum mechanics can be described uniformly correspondingly as an infinite series converges to some limit and as a quantum jump directly into that limit. The second, imaginary dimension of God’s dice corresponds to energy, i.e. to the velocity of information change between two probabilities in both series and jump.

Antonio Acín