In the first two days following the premier of “Anyone Can Quantum” as part of One Entangled Evening on January 26, the short film depicting an epic quantum chess battle between Stephen Hawking and Paul Rudd had been viewed over 1 Million times. The enthusiasm continues; we have passed over 1.5 Million views in less than one week. Hawking and Rudd battle it out in a chess match punctuated by tweets from everyone from Neil deGrasse Tyson to Pope Francis. Quantum Chess takes the structure of classical chess and brings properties such as superposition and entanglement to the game. The premise of the game and additional background are provided through narrator Keanu Reeves.
The brainchild of IQIM’s Manager of Outreach Spiros Michalakis and quantum chess creator Chris Cantwell, this zany project became a true collaboration with director Alex Winter of Trouper Productions, writer Jose Gonzalez, and former IQIM postdoc Gorjan Alagic, proving that “Anyone Can Quantum.” More comments about the film include this recap from Nerdist.com and Popular Science’s blog along with many, many comments online.
