This week, gamers crack a quantum problem that's too tough for computers.

We should really compare this to have a needle in a haystack and humans,

but it's like closing their eyes, putting your hand into the haystack,

and then they actually find the needle, because they look in exactly the right location.

And the brain's built-in backup mechanisms.

Robustness in the brain is perhaps produced using some of the same principles that engineers

design into engineered systems.

Plus the history and science of how we talk to ourselves.

This is the nature podcast for April the 14th, 2016. I'm

Kerry Smith. And I'm Adam Levy. The average 21-year-old American is estimated to have spent

over a year of their life playing video games. But is there any way that all this devoted

attention could be channeled to solving

important scientific problems? Here's Sabrina Maniscalco of the University of Turku in Finland.

There had been before video games developed for tackling certain problems which are computationally

difficult to solve. But the surprising aspect is

that it is possible to do this also for quantum problems. No wonder Sabrina's surprised. In the quantum

world, particles can behave like waves, meaning that a single atom can act like it's in more than one place at

once. But researchers are hoping that human intuition in this counter-intuitive field can overcome

some quantum problems that have outsmarted number crunching. Perhaps playing a computer game can

help build a quantum computer. Quantum computers take advantage of the strange

properties of the quantum world to do many calculations at the same time, quickly overtaking their

classical counterparts. But performing calculations with the individual bits of a quantum computer

...