This entire piece is one assumption after another. > Maybe the puzzle is to escape the program, some sort of an advanced hacking test, a CTF? A competition bet

This entire piece is one assumption after another. > Maybe the puzzle is to escape the program, some sort of an advanced hacking test, a CTF? A competition between billions of species trying to get noticed by God? The assumption here of course is that the goal is to escape. If there was a goal, it could be entirely different. The goal could be to answer a question, a lot like the earth of Douglas Adams. > To escape any program you have to break one of its rules. Not true. If the goal is to escape a program, another viable path is to find the exit condition. Maybe the entire program runs in a try-except, so crashing it isn't even viable. Perhaps the program itself doesn't even have a way of crashing at all. For example, I'm sure a quantum computer could do something unexpected, but I'm not sure it could crash. > So, should we buffer overflow nature? The 2nd law of thermodynamics states that entropy, the amount of randomness and chaos in a closed system, always increases. This law -like any other law in the universe- is unbreakable, entropy could never be decreased. It could be increased tho. There is no reason to believe that increasing entropy would cause anything. We can make exceptionally cold things, we can make exceptionally hot things, and in neither case did the Universe show any signs of anything. I think if I was running a Universe simulation, I would want to set an interesting challenge: 1. We define intelligence loosely as the ability to have some concept of self and others. We can internally model these actors and loosely predict future events. If you were trying to find a super intelligent being, perhaps you would look for a being able to manipulate a hidden physical property that agents cannot otherwise naturally interact with. Searching the simulation for such a case could be relatively easy, you just look for abnormal behaviour in this physical property, maybe high entropy or patterns. 2. Maybe the purpose of our simulation is for the same reason we run simulations of our own universe. It could be a simplified version of their universe, and they are trying to model some future event. Perhaps if we all start nuking each other it might affect some policy decision in an external existence. 3. A lot of the ideas want to add meaning to our existence, but consider the possibility we are running on some computer that got a bit flipped in RAM and accidentally started overwriting it's own code. Some small set of rules were established, which then created everything we currently know. Somebody at some point will realise that the computer is no longer performing the task it is supposed to perform, and reboot it.