For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the intersection of human intuition and quantum physics.
When the novel coronavirus arrived in the borders of Randomberg, a special “Corona Minister” was appointed to decide how to respond, choosing when to enact and relax interventions and restrictions — from information campaigns to closed borders and full quarantine — to balance public health, economic prosperity, and civil liberties. Randomberg is a fictional polity created for an interactive game where users take the role of Corona Minister, switching policies on and off as the coronavirus timeline advances and as indicators change for population health, economy, mental health, and civil rights. The purpose of the “Corona Minister” game — designed by the Denmark-based citizen science gaming website ScienceAtHome — is less to provide a fully accurate epidemiological simulation for COVID-19 than to help players understand the kinds of trade-offs involved in guiding a society through a pandemic. Jacob Sherson, a physicist at Aarhus University who launched and leads ScienceAtHome says that his team created Corona Minister as a much more complicated version of the classic “trolley problem” dilemma, a thought experiment weighing the ethics and consequences of intervention in an unfolding tragedy. “The big problems that we have today involve both technical components and social aspects, psychological and sociological aspects, individual and collective aspects,” Sherson says. “We really need to understand the interplays between technology, individual cognition, and coordination on a grander scale, to see how we can do what you might call public democracy in new ways.”
The ScienceAtHome platform got its start with “Quantum Moves,” a game that Sherson and his team developed (with funding from the John Templeton Foundation) as a means of crowdsourcing human intuition to improve the results he was getting in his quantum physics lab: how best to use finely tuned laser pulses to coax individual atoms into desired quantum states. Figuring out the optimal strength and timing of those pulses generated a landscape of possible combinations of settings that was staggering and there was no good way for the algorithm to know which parts of that landscape were the most promising to examine. The thousands of people who played “Quantum Moves” helped Sherson’s team to identify new strategies for searching. In a paper published in the journal PNAS, Sherson and his co-authors showed that the best solutions to a related quantum problem were reached through an interface allowing players to combine human intuition with the researchers’ complex machinery. In the paper’s conclusion they wrote that “the growing emphasis on human–computer interaction, as computer algorithms are integrated more deeply into the scientific research methodology, will challenge the clear divide between social and natural science.”