• Academics
  • Alumni
Lawrentians Win at NYU-IBM Qiskit Hackathon

Congratulations to Alper Canberk '21 and Areeq Hasan '20, members of team that placed first among undergraduate university students at the New York University-IBM Qiskit Hackathon on Quantum Computing. Hasan is a first-year student at Princeton University and teamed up with three of his classmates, along with Canberk, to design the winning project.

Canberk, president of Lawrenceville's Programming Club, took some time talk about his team's creative process.

Can you tell us about the strategy game you created?

"Georg's Game: Circuit Showdown!" is a player-versus-player digital turn-based card game that incorporates elements of quantum computing by using a quantum computer backend, meaning that the game logic is run on a real quantum computer. One could say that the game is similar to "Rock-Papers-Scissors" or even "Pokemon," but instead of using "Rock, Paper, Scissors" or different types of "Pokemon," the players compete by building their own quantum circuit that they can entangle with the circuit of the other player. The objective of the game for each player is to achieve a particular "measurement" from the quantum circuit, so the players have to try to manipulate their circuits in the most probabilistically favorable way. I know that this game does not make much sense for people with no quantum-computing background, but I believe that it's a great learning tool once someone knows the basics.

You had 24 hours to work on this - how many of those hours did you use?

I'm proud that I was able to maintain a decent performance over the 24 hours with only two hours of sleep. Same goes for my teammates.

It's exciting that you, as a high school student, were part of a team that won a college competition. What did it feel like to find out you had finished first?

Honestly, I didn’t really expect us to place at all. We had all just started learning about quantum computing and we wanted this Hackathon to be mainly a learning experience. The other teams all had great projects. When we heard our name mentioned [in first place], our team voice chat exploded with joy. We had been working on our project for almost 24 hours with very little sleep, but learning that we had won made us forget how tired we felt.

Do you expect to study computing in college?  

I would like to mainly study computer science, but I’m also interested in topics such as electrical and computer engineering, math, and philosophy, so I would definitely like to incorporate those into my studies as well. Within computer science and engineering, I'm extremely interested in the areas of artificial intelligence, neuromorphic computing, and quantum computing. Quantum computing turns out to be a great speed-boost for artificial neural networks, so I believe that my experience learning about quantum computing will help me with my ventures with artificial intelligence in the future.

Do you have any advice for high school students who would like to follow in your footsteps?

I just want to point out that my experience has made me realize that the internet is the greatest resource for learning no matter what someone is interested in. A couple decades ago, it would have been impossible for a high schooler like me to interact with quantum computers and learn about quantum computing. Thanks to the emergence of websites such as Khan Academy, Coursera and various educational online communities, it’s now possible for anyone to learn almost anything for free. I would encourage every student with a spark of curiosity about a particular topic to explore some online resources regarding their interest.