The rapidly-improving speed and versatility of digital computers has mostly driven analogue computers out of use in modern systems, as has the relative difficulty of programming an analogue computer.

What if your reality was nothing more than a complex computer simulation? And if you were just a program on someone else’s hard drive, how would you know? Who would be controlling your every move?

Four RIKEN researchers have used two small quantum computers to simulate quantum information scrambling, an important quantum-information process. This achievement illustrates a potential application ...