Quantum Bloch maze, a puzzle game

Bloch maze is a 2D puzzle game that combines maze navigation with single-qubit gates. The source is on GitHub: https://github.com/chutommy/bloch-maze

the concept

The goal is to build intuition for how single-qubit gates act on a state. Reaching the exit is not enough: the player’s state has to match a target state when they get there.

Each level starts the player in some state, for example |0⟩, and asks for a different one at the exit, for example |+⟩. Some cells in the maze apply a gate to the player’s state when stepped on.

game mechanics

• Quantum states: the player is always in one of the six cardinal states of the Bloch sphere: |0⟩, |1⟩, |+⟩, |-⟩, |R⟩, or |L⟩. All gates in the game are Clifford gates or resets, so the state never leaves this set.
• Quantum gates: cells in the maze correspond to common gates:
  • X, Y, Z: the Pauli gates.
  • H: the Hadamard gate.
  • S: the phase gate.
  • 0, 1: reset gates that set the state to |0⟩ or |1⟩.

Stepping on a gate cell applies that gate to the current state. For example, stepping on H in state |0⟩ gives |+⟩. Reaching the exit in the wrong state fails the level, so a solution is a path whose sequence of gates maps the initial state to the target state.