> Is a redstone interferometer an actually thing, a quick search didn't turn anything up? I'm probably using slightly different terminology than other people -

> Is a redstone interferometer an actually thing, a quick search didn't turn anything up? I'm probably using slightly different terminology than other people -- I haven't played much in a while. The basic idea is to use two quasi-connected redstone wires hooked up to a piston -- one providing an update signal but no power and one providing power but no update signal. The circuit is such that the two wires are actually branches off of a single redstone wire, using only redstone -- so you can detect if the left or right branch off of a redstone line updates first (within a single update cycle) based on if the piston extends: it only extends if the line carrying the update signal is updated after the line carrying the power signal. (If they come in the other order, it stays retracted because it updates before there's power available.) > how would you decide between them being part of the game mechanics and them being shadows of the outer world given that you have no ground truth knowledge of what the game is supposed to be like? You only have an operational model, just like us -- but it's eventually going to look like an extremely localized computation running their world that occasionally gets bumped by outside sources. That sounds like them discovering that their reality is a subregion hosted in another, richer reality. The question of "game mechanics" only has meaning to the people outside in their language for discussing their actions -- at the end of the day, there is no "game", there's only what the simulation does as a facet of reality. The people inside will accurately suss out a model that includes a structure that looks like them being run as a simulation. How they interpret that is likely to be different, but no more or less correct, than how we do.