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When the simulator shows a previously unseen object, it must first simulate all its history accounting for all effects to ensure that the shown state is legit a

When the simulator shows a previously unseen object, it must first simulate all its history accounting for all effects to ensure that the shown state is legit and doesn't expose the conspiracy. This state should also account for all future investigations. The easiest way to achieve this is to run a precise simulation, so it doesn't save any resources.

ericb 5y ago
Maybe, but if you can segment out the unobserved items, and back-calculate it lazily, you could save a lot of processing and memory. The place to implement an optimization like this would be at the items with the biggest O in your world, which is usually the smallest building block--what you'd have the "most" of, which would drive the largest memory and processing demands.
naasking 5y ago
> When the simulator shows a previously unseen object, it must first simulate all its history accounting for all effects to ensure that the shown state is legit and doesn't expose the conspiracy The simulation only needs to produce observations that are consistent with the knowledge of the first observer. Sometimes bit even that, as I describe in the blog post, because eyewitness testimony is known to be quite unreliable. I'm not sure what sort of history you're thinking of specifically.
- GoblinSlayer 5y ago
  Existence of Neptune was conjectured before it was observed, the testimony came from instruments. If such consistency with contemporary observers was used, scientific revolutions wouldn't happen as observers would never observe what contradicts their knowledge.
  - naasking 5y ago
    I agree, there are necessarily some background facts that must be consistent with the environment. Science might eventually be able to trace the trajectory of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs, but that doesn't necessarily mean you would need to simulate every asteroid in the solar system since its initial formation. The amount of information science could infer on many questions is strictly bounded and in those cases we could only reason stochastically. The data presented at time of first observation can then be generated randomly from the set of answers consistent with what's already known.

ericb 5y ago

Maybe, but if you can segment out the unobserved items, and back-calculate it lazily, you could save a lot of processing and memory. The place to implement an optimization like this would be at the items with the biggest O in your world, which is usually the smallest building block--what you'd have the "most" of, which would drive the largest memory and processing demands.

naasking 5y ago

> When the simulator shows a previously unseen object, it must first simulate all its history accounting for all effects to ensure that the shown state is legit and doesn't expose the conspiracy The simulation only needs to produce observations that are consistent with the knowledge of the first observer. Sometimes bit even that, as I describe in the blog post, because eyewitness testimony is known to be quite unreliable. I'm not sure what sort of history you're thinking of specifically.

GoblinSlayer 5y ago
Existence of Neptune was conjectured before it was observed, the testimony came from instruments. If such consistency with contemporary observers was used, scientific revolutions wouldn't happen as observers would never observe what contradicts their knowledge.
- naasking 5y ago
  I agree, there are necessarily some background facts that must be consistent with the environment. Science might eventually be able to trace the trajectory of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs, but that doesn't necessarily mean you would need to simulate every asteroid in the solar system since its initial formation. The amount of information science could infer on many questions is strictly bounded and in those cases we could only reason stochastically. The data presented at time of first observation can then be generated randomly from the set of answers consistent with what's already known.