Quantum Entanglement And The Art Of Hotel Breakfast Management

When faced with multiple options, we often resort to randomization to make a decision. For example, in sports like cricket and tennis, a coin toss determines which team bats first or who serves first. If there are more than two options, we might use other methods, like drawing straws or rolling dice. More generally, we can imagine a "coin" or "die" with as many sides as there are choices.

Now, suppose multiple individuals need to make one of two choices simultaneously. Each could pull out a coin (or use a virtual version like a random number generator) and decide based on the result. For instance, two hotel guests who are indifferent about whether to have tea or coffee for breakfast might toss a coin: heads for tea, tails for coffee. From what we know about physics, there's no reason to believe that one guest's coin toss would affect the other's—they are independent events.

But what if the hotel is running low on both beverages, and to even things out (coffee tends to be more expensive than tea), would prefer that one guest chooses tea while the other opts for coffee during their stay? Since both guests are indifferent, the hotel management hopes that whenever one guest's coin lands on heads (choosing tea), the other guest’s coin lands on tails (choosing coffee).

In essence, the hotel wants the results of the two coin tosses to be anti-correlated. Yet, based on physical principles, this is unlikely. To achieve this, the management could intervene by providing both guests with special coins connected by a long, fine, and flexible fiber. This connection would be such that when one coin shows heads, the other shows tails. A cruder and more obvious way to implement this would be to weld the coins together, so they always display opposite sides half the time, ensuring smooth breakfast operations.

However, the hotel does not want the guests to know about this arrangement, making the fiber or the welded coin solutions undesirable. It turns out that there is a quantum physical solution: quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement creates a "higher-order" correlation which can be physically imperceptible to the average person. In the quantum world, it perfectly (anti) correlates two quantum physical objects like photons or electrons. This approach would require the hotel to invest in a quantum computer. It is more likely that this quantum-based service to anti-correlate the coins could be presented to the guests in a more appealing way than the correlation method based on the classical physics of welded coins or fine fibers. Let’s hope the hotel’s customer service and marketing teams are up for the challenge!

But the hotel can also implement the simple task of anti-correlating the two welded or fiber-connected coins imperceptibly by using a regular computer program, or even simulating quantum entanglement on the same conventional computer. Why resort to something so dramatic as using a quantum computer? Stay tuned for the next post where I will address this question.