Ya wake up in the cells, your head a-boomin and a-thumpin. An officer helps loosen ya tongue, Guantamo style, and before ya even had breakfast, he’s a-shoutin and a-rantin for a confession.
There’s even a deal on the table. Rat on ya buddy in the next cell and the judge’ll cutcha some slack. Keep schtum and both of youse’ll go down together.
Ya’ll been there–the prisoner’s dilemma. And ya’ll know the best strategy is to rat on ya buddy and let him rot in jail. It ain’t nothing personal.
Now Anton “Beam-me-up, Scotty” Zeilinger at the University of Vienna has a better idea. He’s gone and created a quantum version of prisoner’s dilemma using an optical quantum computer.
In quantum prisoner’s dilemma, entanglement introduces an element of co-operation whether ya want it or not. So ratin on ya buddy gives ya no benefit over co-operatin with the cops.
This ain’t the first time anybody’s gotten all quantum with a prisoner. Jiangfeng Du and his buddies at the University of Science and Technology of China nailed a similar trick using NMR a few years ago.
But it does look like a cool way to show off the buffed-up chrome and fancy wing mirrors on Anton’s latest quantum computer. And it’ll help him and his buddies no end when Friday nite’s a-rompin and a-ruttin turns sour.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0708.1129: Experimental Realization of a Quantum Game on a One-way Quantum Computer