Quantum Computers For Creatives, As Moth Launches Atlas

This weekend in London, Moth opened quantum computers for creatives to people with no physics background, and they sat at a row of screens dragging sliders across photographs. None of them were programmers. The pictures turned into something they had not quite expected.

The computers in front of them did not run those calculations. Each job went over the internet to a quantum processor, a chip cooled to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, inside a refrigerator the size of a wardrobe. The answer came back within seconds. They had walked in off the street that weekend, because Moth, a small quantum software company, had opened its building to anyone who wanted to try.

Downstairs, a hackathon ran in three-hour shifts so that more people could get a turn on the machines before Sunday, when visitors could come back and try what the teams had made. A hackathon is a weekend race, the kind where teams try to build something new against the clock. The launch party drew quantum physicists, game developers, artists, and the plainly curious, which is a wider mix than the quantum computing industry usually manages to put in one room.

The software on the screens is called Atlas, which Moth describes as a quantum computing platform for creativity, and a closed alpha has been testing it for most of the year. An alpha is a closed group of early users. The machines underneath belong to providers such as IBM and IQM, a Finnish hardware company, and they are real quantum computers that companies and research laboratories already pay to use. Nobody in the building was looking at a quantum circuit.