Quantum Entanglement And The Art Of Hotel Breakfast Management: 50%-50%?

In the previous post, "Quantum Entanglement and the Art of Hotel Breakfast Management," we explored how a hotel sought to improve the distribution of tea and coffee between two extended-stay guests during breakfast. Both guests were indifferent to whether they drank tea or coffee, and the morning shift manager noticed that if their coin flips to choose between the beverages were perfectly anti-correlated, they would always drink different beverages. This would ensure a balanced consumption of tea and coffee, stabilizing the hotel's breakfast inventory.

To implement this idea, the manager collaborated with the marketing and customer service teams. Being up to the challenge, they proposed a solution where the guests would digitally flip their coins using an add-on to the hotel's app. To encourage app adoption, the hotel offered loyalty credits that could be redeemed for free services during future stays. The tech team quickly developed the app add-on, enabling guests to toss their anti-correlated digital coins, deciding which beverage to enjoy for breakfast.

At first, everything seemed to work smoothly. One of the guests, Guest B, believed the digital coin flip provided a 50/50 chance of drinking tea or coffee, that is, she expected to be drinking tea half the time and coffee the other half the time during her breakfasts at the hotel. She found this appealing as it offered a balance between mild and strong caffeine doses. However, after tracking her caffeine consumption over ten days, she was shocked to find that she had been drinking tea only 30% of the time and coffee 70% of the time. Out of ten days, she drank coffee on seven occasions and tea on only three. Concerned about the potential health impact of higher caffeine levels from coffee, she raised her complaint to hotel management.

Upon investigation, the management discovered that the anti-correlated digital coins were biased, resulting in the (Heads, Tails) outcome—where Guest A drinks tea and Guest B drinks coffee—two-thirds of the time. Conversely, the (Tails, Heads) outcome, where Guest A drinks coffee and Guest B drinks tea, occurred only one-third of the time. This bias reduced the uncertainty in the result of the coin tosses, making it possible for undesired patterns to appears in the results overtime, like the one Guest B found. This bias was due to the way the app's code and pseudo-random number generator simulated the coin tosses. While there are conventional ways to un-bias coin tosses, the hotel management is forward looking and explores quantum solutions.

Determined to fully satisfy their guests, the hotel management decides to un-bias the correlated coin flips by adopting a quantum-based system which can harness true uncertainty only possible in the quantum physical realm. As suggested in the previous post, this is done through quantum entanglement, a physical feature that not only provides correlation between the "quantum" coins but also provides maximum uncertainty in the resulting "flips" of the entangled quantum coins.

Investing in the exploration and eventual adoption of quantum computing and communication technologies should be a key component of best practices for any business aiming to stay competitive and attract customers. This perspective is further strengthened by the well-developed applications of quantum entanglement and quantum uncertainty in cybersecurity that can also benefit business like hotels. But that is a topic of discussion for another post.