2 ms·

I kind of had a similar reaction watching Devs after having read that short story many years ago. But now that I’ve re-read the short story, I have to say, it’s

• grey-area 6y ago
  For those who believe thinking or discussing a story is a 'spoiler', don't read on. Both contain the same contradictions: How can a computer calculate everything about the universe or a part of it with any degree of accuracy, without having space to store the information (i.e. having enough bits to store information on every subatomic particle and its state)? If you treat the earth as a closed system say to try to get around this, your simulation is incomplete (e.g. excludes the influence of the sun). An example from the article: this thing could execute an infinite loop in less than ten seconds In what sense could an infinite loop take 10 seconds? In what sense can you brute force the halting problem? An example from devs: The universe is a deterministic system, ergo the future can be predicted with full accuracy with enough inputs. But there are not enough qubits in the universe (which someone evidently told them, because it made it into the script, but is then blithely ignored). https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/8898 https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/8898