Quantum Computing

Quantum Computing
Details
Operations	10,000 ops
Effect	Use probability amplitudes to generate bonus ops

Quantum Computing is a project in Universal Paperclips.

Summary

Quantum Computing allows you to get bonus operations by clicking the "Compute" button. Bonus operations can be either positive or negative.

Computations are only allowed once you have earned one or more Photonic Chips.

It is possible to go over your maximum operations by successfully generating positive computations when you were already at your maximum operations. This overage will be revoked after ~10 seconds, so it is best if you generate these and spend them immediately.

Yield

The amount of ops you will gain is based on the amount of dark vs light photonic chips; the darker the chip, the higher the yield.

Each Photonic Chip slot counts against the total - a fully "black" chip and a fully "white" chip will effectively cancel each other out.

The formula for point gain at any time:

formula for quantum computing

• n: number of photonic chips you have
• t: current time
• tau: period
• a: constant scaling factor

It looks like this when n = 10:

plot of quantum computing bonus when there are 10 chips

Strategy

When you have enough Photonic Chips it may be hard to determine the "average" darkness. However by clicking twice in succession you can determine if ops are going up or down and use this to your advantage - if the numbers are positive and going up, click as rapidly as possible until it reaches the max, continue as it goes down, and stop when it gets close to zero. This will give you the most positive operations.

The best times to start clicking are as follows

• all boxes slowly fade away, and then appear as a gradient of light to dark from the left to the full right. Click rapidly as soon as the boxes appear. You'll get a yield of about 2750 ops at the maximum
• Any time the right most box goes from white to black, start clicking as quickly as possible. The chips rotate on a cycle where they all go black, then half, then half again. You'll get 4 rounds of positive ops for every cycle.

Overage is most effective used in two ways:

• When you are focused on building creativity, strategic modeling can slow down your climb because it takes 16000 ops and you won't gain creativity while your memory is refilling. However, quantum ops will fill this up very quickly. Thus, a good strategy is to start a new tournament just before the quantum chips are about to go all black (you will see them 'walk' from left to right before this happens). Unfortunately, with all strategies unlocked you won't complete a tournament before the quantum chips cycle, but you can get this boost for every other tournament.
• You can use the overage to reach projects that your memory capacity wouldn't otherwise allow. Thus if you have 23 memory chips and you need 25K ops for a project you can usually get there using quantum overage. The maximum amount of overage seems to be about 2750 ops.