Podcast with Harry Kumar, Co-founder, Director & CCO of Moth Quantum

Jeremy Gilbertson and Mark Fielding from Thinking on Paper interview Harry Kumar, co-founder, director, and Chief Creative Officer of Moth Quantum. Moth is the company behind Quantum Backrooms, a browser game whose maze is generated on real quantum hardware. Each tile is a qubit, and the walls come from the correlations between them. Harry is clear the game runs no faster than a classical one. He explains why Moth built Atlas, a platform for musicians, artists and game makers with no quantum background, why he thinks quantum today is where generative AI was in 2016, and why he tries not to let AI replace his thinking, starting with the first draft. Who is quantum creativity for? Can you hear quantum randomness? Which modality makes the best beats? Is creativity inherently quantum? Editor’s Note: In the podcast Harry uses the phrase “Dylan Goes Electric”. This refers to an incident at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival where performing artist Bob Dylan shocks the audience by unexpectedly using an electric guitar instead of the traditional acoustic guitar normally used at folk festivals. Harry sees this as an analogy to what can happen when creative people take a hold of a new technology and…