2 ms·
That's not necessarily true in discrete systems. For example we can cache results of common interactions for reuse. See HashLife and relatives, for example: a v
by robotresearcher 11y ago
That's not necessarily true in discrete systems. For example we can cache results of common interactions for reuse. See HashLife and relatives, for example: a vastly more efficient way to compute game of Life without considering one cell at a time, but giving identical results.
- breuleux 11y agoI'm aware, but I think the efficiency of these methods is rather circumstantial: they work well because of the way our computers are organized. What you are comparing are two simulation methods, with are both very far removed from what they simulate. Instead, imagine implementing HashLife inside a Game of Life universe. It is possible, because the system is Turing complete, but the overhead would be horrific: probably thousands of cells for each cell you try to simulate. You would have to duplicate the cache all over the place to minimize roundtrip costs, each cell would be a whole machinery to allow signals to be routed there, plus logic to handle synchronization issues between each "unit", and so on. It's a very neat idea that works very well with our computer systems, but if you were to implement it using the resources of the simulated system, it would be a catastrophe. And similarly, I don't think you could build a physical "cache" that can simulate physical interactions faster than they happen, except in a few contrived cases.