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I'm not a simulationist, but both quantum and relativistic phenomena do look a lot like simulation optimizations to patch over increased granularity of a simula
by KMag 3y ago
I'm not a simulationist, but both quantum and relativistic phenomena do look a lot like simulation optimizations to patch over increased granularity of a simulation and improve parallelism in a simulation.
For instance, my understanding is that nuclear reactor simulations mesh the volume into volumes much much larger than atoms (cm-scale, in most cases, I guess) and then use bulk statistics for each element of the mesh. A finer mesh is much more expensive to compute, and gives diminishing returns in terms of accuracy.
My fist job was discrete event network simulation. Some competitors used per-link bulk statistics instead of per-packet discrete events to run simulations much faster, but with lower accuracy. We had a reduced-accuracy hybrid simulation mode to use per-link bulk statistics to affect the per-packet event simulations for an epoch, and then use those results to update the link bulk statistics for the next epoch. I'm sure these sorts of optimizations are common across all kinds of simulation domains.
Limiting information travel to the speed of light, and using true randomness instead of hidden state determinism would improve simulation parallelization.
Someone might reasonably believe the "real" universe isn't quantitized and/or it's quanta are smaller than our universe's, and our observations of quantum phenomena are artifacts of the use of bulk statistics in simulating the mesh of our universe.