You’ve just booted up a game on a state-of-the-art quantum computer. You’re running 19 superconducting quantum bits on a processor held at near absolute zero. Anticipating its sheer power, you press ...

In 1950, a man named John Bennett, an Australian employee of the now-defunct British technology firm Ferranti, created what may be history’s first gaming computer. It could play a game called Nim, a ...