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Interestingly enough, if you are to design a really big and scalable MMO game (with topological metrics, as opposed to a location graph), you will probably intr

Interestingly enough, if you are to design a really big and scalable MMO game (with topological metrics, as opposed to a location graph), you will probably introduce similar hacks to overcome limitations. There will be "speed of light" and "time dilation" analogues as the result of limited computing power. You'll get rid of "realism" early enough, as the result of limited memory — why keep the word stored, when you can procedurally generate it on demand? And it is natural to think in interaction probabilities — implementing a random number source and using it consistently is much cheaper than tracking all collisions on micro scale. These results look somewhat different in modern MMO games (e.g. EVE Online), as computing nodes are arranged within a network (a large graph). But imagine a "computational fabric", with atom-scale nodes arranged topologically (a space made of computronium). What kind of effects would be natural to implement there, and what are the hacks to use? My hypothesis is that what you'll get in such arrangement, if you are to design your simulation efficiently, is quantum mechanics, more or less.

mikhailfranco 9y ago
Is there any published work along these lines?
- atemerev 9y ago
  There are some papers on relativistic effects appearing naturally in connected lattices with interacting nodes, but the rest are my speculations (or I wasn't looking hard enough). I am currently looking for a PhD position in physics and/or network science to explore this line of thought.
lou1306 9y ago
But these "hacks" are provably needed only in the reality we live in. Let's say we are in a simulation and the finite speed of light is just a hack... Then you are implying that, outside of the simulation, speed of light is not finite: otherwise limiting it would not be a hack, but a realistic simulation. Now, all our knowledge in physics and information theory are based on the finite speed of light. Therefore we should prove that computing power is limited even in a world where light has infinite speed (and I'm not sure it is), before deciding what a "simulation hack" is. Right now I only see a lot of "We are in a simulation, and the outside world is just like this one, but different"
- atemerev 9y ago
  Perhaps (and why not?) — I am not trying to answer big cosmological questions here, or even to put any evidence for or against the simulation hypothesis. I only want to figure out whether it is possible to obtain quantum mechanics (or something similar) as a limit of some computational constraints in some hypothetical environment.
  - Retra 9y ago
    That's a strange inversion, though. As far as we know, computational constraints (memory-time tradeoff, entropy/information theory) are all due indirectly to fundamental physical constraints. That is, the concept of something being a 'simulation' sort of implies it is inheriting constraints from an outside reality. If you then say the outside reality is a simulation, you can't explain all of it's constraints in terms of computational artifacts, because that contradicts it being a simulation.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - atemerev 9y ago
      No, like I said, I am not interested in answering the question whether our world is a "simulation". I am interested in exploring whether the somewhat "counterintuitive" formulations of quantum mechanics can be derived from "simpler" models and constraints (and I am acutely aware that I am not the first one to be burned with such a gargantuan task).
- BoiledCabbage 9y ago
  > Let's say we are in a simulation and the finite speed of light is just a hack... Then you are implying that, outside of the simulation, speed of light is not finite: otherwise limiting it would not be a hack, but a realistic simulation Not necessarily. I don't think op is necessarily arguing we're in a simulation. It might simply be that we're looking at things wrong. We fundamentally believe that computation rests upon physics. What if that's backwards, what if physics rests upon computation - and computation is the most fundamental element of the universe. While it may sound absurd at first, it's no more or less absurd than "natural laws make everything go". Somewhere we have to assert there is a bottom and it is allowed to exist - and it's rules just work. We currently just set that to physics. But if it were computation instead there could be a law of computation that you can't compute and an "infinite" universe and infinite instant communication due to the multiplicative factor of communicating. And this results in a "speed of information"/light. Who knows, maybe Brooks Law about software really is a fundamental law of the universe. ;)
gus_massa 9y ago
The problem with your hypothesis is that quantum mechanics make the calculation more difficult/costly, not more efficient. The easiest way to show this property are quantum computers. If you have a quantum computer with n qbits, you have 2^n combinations, so to simulate a quantum computer in a classical computer you need O(2^n) time. So it's very inefficient. [On the other hand, for a small set of lucky problems, if you construct a quantum computer you can solve in polynomial time some problems that require exponential time in classical computers. (But remember that not every problem get this speedup, and it's very difficult to construct a general quantum computer with more than a few qbits.)]

mikhailfranco 9y ago

Is there any published work along these lines?

atemerev 9y ago
There are some papers on relativistic effects appearing naturally in connected lattices with interacting nodes, but the rest are my speculations (or I wasn't looking hard enough). I am currently looking for a PhD position in physics and/or network science to explore this line of thought.

lou1306 9y ago

But these "hacks" are provably needed only in the reality we live in. Let's say we are in a simulation and the finite speed of light is just a hack... Then you are implying that, outside of the simulation, speed of light is not finite: otherwise limiting it would not be a hack, but a realistic simulation. Now, all our knowledge in physics and information theory are based on the finite speed of light. Therefore we should prove that computing power is limited even in a world where light has infinite speed (and I'm not sure it is), before deciding what a "simulation hack" is. Right now I only see a lot of "We are in a simulation, and the outside world is just like this one, but different"

atemerev 9y ago
Perhaps (and why not?) — I am not trying to answer big cosmological questions here, or even to put any evidence for or against the simulation hypothesis. I only want to figure out whether it is possible to obtain quantum mechanics (or something similar) as a limit of some computational constraints in some hypothetical environment.
- Retra 9y ago
  That's a strange inversion, though. As far as we know, computational constraints (memory-time tradeoff, entropy/information theory) are all due indirectly to fundamental physical constraints. That is, the concept of something being a 'simulation' sort of implies it is inheriting constraints from an outside reality. If you then say the outside reality is a simulation, you can't explain all of it's constraints in terms of computational artifacts, because that contradicts it being a simulation.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - atemerev 9y ago
    No, like I said, I am not interested in answering the question whether our world is a "simulation". I am interested in exploring whether the somewhat "counterintuitive" formulations of quantum mechanics can be derived from "simpler" models and constraints (and I am acutely aware that I am not the first one to be burned with such a gargantuan task).
BoiledCabbage 9y ago
> Let's say we are in a simulation and the finite speed of light is just a hack... Then you are implying that, outside of the simulation, speed of light is not finite: otherwise limiting it would not be a hack, but a realistic simulation Not necessarily. I don't think op is necessarily arguing we're in a simulation. It might simply be that we're looking at things wrong. We fundamentally believe that computation rests upon physics. What if that's backwards, what if physics rests upon computation - and computation is the most fundamental element of the universe. While it may sound absurd at first, it's no more or less absurd than "natural laws make everything go". Somewhere we have to assert there is a bottom and it is allowed to exist - and it's rules just work. We currently just set that to physics. But if it were computation instead there could be a law of computation that you can't compute and an "infinite" universe and infinite instant communication due to the multiplicative factor of communicating. And this results in a "speed of information"/light. Who knows, maybe Brooks Law about software really is a fundamental law of the universe. ;)

gus_massa 9y ago

The problem with your hypothesis is that quantum mechanics make the calculation more difficult/costly, not more efficient. The easiest way to show this property are quantum computers. If you have a quantum computer with n qbits, you have 2^n combinations, so to simulate a quantum computer in a classical computer you need O(2^n) time. So it's very inefficient. [On the other hand, for a small set of lucky problems, if you construct a quantum computer you can solve in polynomial time some problems that require exponential time in classical computers. (But remember that not every problem get this speedup, and it's very difficult to construct a general quantum computer with more than a few qbits.)]