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So from what I can tell the argument is roughly that there are VMs and there's bare metal, and some there's more VMs chances are we're in a VM. What exactly wo

• Tenoke 6y ago
  It depends, but it's quite possible a simulation of that scale will need some compression to reduce the amount of compute required to run it and that might be detectable once we dig deep and far enough in physics and astronomy.
• credit_guy 6y ago
  Yes. For example, in the bare metal (i.e. non-simulated world) you have various conservation laws, like the conservation of momentum or of energy. In a simulation with finite precision arithmetic, you might observe some round-off errors, which would translate in violations of the conservation law. A smart algorithm might try to keep the errors below a certain tolerance level (let's say 10^(50)). But then in some cases it might turn out to be uncomputable (undecidable). See for example [1] for examples of undecidable ray-tracing problem. [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02574009 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02574009
• wizzwizz4 6y ago
  Except “bare metal” isn't well-defined. The biggest problem with these simulation arguments (imo) is that they assume an answer to “what is reality?” yet don't actually work with any of them.