7 ms·
Four billion years in four minutes – Simulating worlds on the GPU
- shanxS 2y agoSometimes I wonder what it’d be like to live in simulated universe.
- dylan604 2y agoYou say that as if you aren't. What proof do you have either way?
- TheHumanist 2y agoPretty sure all of you are in my simulation... Right? Or maybe I'm just in a coma and this is a coma dream...
- senectus1 2y agowhy does it matter? If we are, we're in a sandbox that cant be escaped. live your best life and get on with it If we aren't Live your best life and get on with it. I've never seen the point of the question.
- jagged-chisel 2y ago“I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility” https://qntm.org/responsibility https://qntm.org/responsibility
- bilekas 2y agoWhen thinking about this one, I always wonder if it even matters.. playing both "Yes" and "No" scenarios doesn't really offer any insight for me. Maybe it's a degree of nihilism but it makes me not get overwhelmed.
- cout 2y agoA simulation has a nonzero chance of having exploits, and it's debatable whether it is in our best interest to discover them.
- heyitsguay 2y agoWhat's an "exploit"? Is electricity an exploit of that weird phenomenon where a balloon sticks to a wall sometimes?
- koudelka 2y agoI’d imagine that’s an application of a rule, whereas an exploit is a violation of a rule that allows for (a && !a) or some such inconsistency.
- brunokim 2y agoGod created electromagnetism as a way to transmit power between the fusion plant and its simulated planet, and is now delighted that we also use it to trade Pokemons back and forth.
- bilekas 2y agoI consider biting my tongue when eating a glitch in the matrix. If there's a higher level exploit, I definitely don't wanna know!
- mensetmanusman 2y agoConsciousness is the exploit.
- candiddevmike 2y agoWatch the show Pantheon sometime! No spoilers, just highly relevant.
- MaxikCZ 2y agoThat series blew me away, both seasons, every episode is just totally awesome. Hard to reccomend without spoiling.
- ffhhj 2y agoThe Universe tries its best to catch up with Math. So, Math isn't fully simulable by the real?
- beepbooptheory 2y agoWhat's it even like to live in a non-simulated one!
- dheera 2y agoThe energy and matter in the universe is actually a big analog quantum computer simulating the result of a set of equations. Nobody said the simulation had to be run on semiconductors.
- thfuran 2y agoIt's less commonly said, but the territory isn't the map either.
- xwolfi 2y agoWell you are in a way, what is a simulation ? It's just a set of rules you follow that are simpler than the more complex environment that it runs in: I suppose if we could "see" "outside" the "universe", we'd understand that maybe our reality is very simple and limited compared to the "reality" outside. Maybe this would be true infinitely, or maybe the outside reality would be much more logical than ours, and we'd accept it's finite. But since we have a beginning, and a flow of time, we probably also have a birth, a mother, and maybe even a purpose... but that's a very human way to think, might all just be random soup. But imagine there's a self-aware agent in a simulation we create, he starts thinking the same thoughts, everyone mock him "we're all just random, there is no God, no design, how could so much energy be spent on such a useless giant block of empty space for any reason", he would have to sort of agree, but he would be sort of wrong. And discovering us, would bring him no solace: we can't tell him of our own designers ourselves. Discovering them, would bring us no solace either, for the same reason. That's why the concept of God is stupid: God has a God too, so what do we do now, solved no problem to accept His existence.
- mistermann 2y agoI think modern people have so much faith in this reality, they'd have little chance accepting that it is other than it seems. Any evidence would have to be stark.
- melagonster 2y agoActually, physics supports the probability that we live in a simulation. Our universe has the highest limitation of speed and the smallest units of length and energy.
- mistermann 2y agoNeuroscience, psychology, public opinion polls, and internet forums demonstrate that we do. The problem is, the nature of this style of simulation, as opposed to the Bostrom theory ("the" simulation theory (singular, there can be only one)), makes it (nearly) impossible to realize. This is both tragic and hilarious, especially since we have extensive knowledge of this flaw.
- nurettin 2y agoIt would probably slow down or cause elevated heat between two mirrors.
- WithinReason 2y agoIt would be exactly like this one
- disillusioned 2y agoOnly tangentially related, but the lovely (quite) short story "I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility" is fantastic and kind of hits on simulating worlds, in a sense: https://qntm.org/responsibility https://qntm.org/responsibility
- golergka 2y agoI just love how a world-class quantum computer scientist who just made a discovery that just blows up everything known to mankind is up to the very end is worried about missing a bus.
- gavmor 2y agoTo deepen this tangent, I'll recommend Philip K. Dick's The Trouble With Bubbles which imagines 60s cocktail party guests showing off their miniature planet-scale terrariums.
- arminiusreturns 2y agoAmazing, thank you for introducing me to this!
- Waterluvian 2y agoI’m not sure I really know how to handle this. Do I just read the latest version linked at the top of the page? Or is the one offered by this like somehow more canonical or something? I’m not sure I’ve ever been faced with different versions of a fiction before. Just textbooks. I really love thought pieces like this if you refrain from poking holes in the logic or physics. I love the idea of a multiverse where they’re all actually just identical so it’s mostly moot.
- bee_rider 2y agoCanon is just a construct invented to sell merchandise and keep out competitors. Enjoy whichever version of the story you’d like!
- niccl 2y agodoes anybody know what the music accompanying the full video was? It seemed familiar but I couldn't place it. Maybe AI generated?
- pietervdvn 2y agoIt sounds an awful lot like "Maiden Voyage" (the instrumental version) by the clockwork dolls, but not quite.
- FrancoisBosun 2y agoSunshine (Adagio in D minor) https://open.spotify.com/intl-fr/track/50ExtKr8j9cHTY3OEw282G https://open.spotify.com/intl-fr/track/50ExtKr8j9cHTY3OEw282... I asked Siri to identify the song.
- dheera 2y agoSounds more like "jackhammer in D minor" rather than an "adagio"
- swayvil 2y ago>written entirely in GLSL fragment shaders What's the language for that? (The music is pretty cliche. Maybe it was written by AI)
- daemonologist 2y agoThe music is "Adagio in D Minor", and probably cliche more because it's been used so much rather than because it was cliche when written. It was originally composed by John Murphy for the 2007 film Sunshine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine:_Music_from_the_Motion_Picture#%22Adagio_in_D_Minor%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine:_Music_from_the_Motio...
- snitch182 2y agoSunshine is one really fine piece of film. Beautiful.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ascar 2y agoNot sure if that's actually your question, but GLSL is the language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL_Shading_Language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL_Shading_Language
- niederman 2y agoGLSL is the language.
- FredPret 2y agoToday, a simple simulation at 60fps. Tomorrow: "When you gaze long into the simulation, the simulation gazes back"
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ahmadmk 2y agoThere is an excellent hard science fiction book called permutation city that very related to this topic…it made me feel like i was in a dream when i read this post’s title
- redbluething 2y agoI finished that book yesterday. I had exactly the same reaction.
- netcraft 2y agoI havent yet read permutation city but Diaspora is one of my favorite sci-fi novels. I need to make time for it
- xwolfi 2y agoDiaspora gives me shivers just thinking about it. Permutation City is fun, but not as inspiring as Diaspora.
- Bluestein 2y agoHe - rightly, and often - makes these rounds here when simulacrums are at hand. Well deserved.-
- exe34 2y agothere's a short story in his anthology that is a sequel to diaspora. oceanic.
- o11c 2y agoNot sure why, but all the shadertoy examples embedded in the page play at like 0.6 FPS for me. When I open the linked "final shader" on the shadertoy website I get 60fps just fine ...
- CGamesPlay 2y agoIf your browser is like mine, there is a clipped play button below the rewind button that resolves the issue.
- o11c 2y agoAh, that indeed works. Taking a look, the CSS throws warnings about being ignored; adding "position: absolute" fixes that and makes the button fully visible.
- reason-mr 2y agoIn truth, it must be said that some details were omitted by the simulation :)
- kmoser 2y agoBack in 1996/1997 I worked on a CD-ROM game that simulated movement of the tectonic plates, as well as temperature, elevation, and precipitation, over millions of years. Amazing to see how evolution (heh!) of computing hardware and software have come so far in 28 years: https://www.kmoser.com/evolution/ https://www.kmoser.com/evolution/
- fersaysrelax 2y agoI think you are the first person I come across that knows that game and you were an actual dev on it! So thank you! I played it when I was around 13(I think) and I loved it. The whole concept of simulating a planet and the animals on it was pretty much mind blowing for me at the time(it still is). I should have kept the poster that came with it...the different sapien evolutionary branches were really interesting.
- kmoser 2y agoCool! It's admittedly an obscure game. My main contribution included the random generation and movement of the cratons. This involved mapping Cartesian to spherical coordinates but harder because each row of tiles was offset by half a tile's width from the rows above and below, like a brick wall. We wrote an in-house editor that let us create and animate the different cratons, starting with the Pangaea configuration (basically all cratons stuck together as a giant continent) all the way through to how they are arranged now, to simulate how they moved historically. That was also difficult! I also worked on the initial placement of some visual elements that dotted the landscape, and the serialization of the different data structures for loading/saving games. After it shipped they gave each of us devs a couple of shrink-wrapped copies of the boxed final product but weirdly they were not the US version. I still have an (unopened) Portuguese version that probably has the poster.
- jonah 2y agoThis is rad! I recently read Assembling California by John McPhee[1][2] - highly recommended BTW. Anyway, I was musing that I'd love to see a 3D globe with a time slider that I could play around with and visualize the (projected of course) movement of the plates to get us to where we are now. Do you know of anything like that? [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19898.Assembling_California https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19898.Assembling_Califor... [2] excerpt: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/09/07/assembling-california-part-i https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/09/07/assembling-cal...
- harha 2y agoOne of my favorite courses at university was energy policy analysis, where we played around with the EPPA model (developed at MIT) [0]. We made changes to certain parameters to see how things might work out, e.g. if cost of energy storage is reduced 10x. Lots of fun, but I unfortunately never managed to find anything similar to do in my job. [0]: https://globalchange.mit.edu/research/research-tools/eppa https://globalchange.mit.edu/research/research-tools/eppa
- GardenLetter27 2y agoWhy only fragment shaders? If you had vertex shaders for a heightmap too then you could zoom down to the surface.
- noduerme 2y agoMm..cool but the last part where any civilization that has night lights would by definition burn all the fossil fuels and turn the place into a desert seems like an assumption based on only one possible trajectory of our own civilization, let alone all other possible alien civilizations. There's nothing to make death by warming and desertification any likelier than nuclear war or the development of clean fusion, or a plague or an invasion from another nearby procedurally generated earth-like planet. Basically it's a cool sim when it's trying to simulate stuff that actually happened, and before it gets opinionated. Moreover, it apparently equates heat with dryness, and also doesn't take into account the effect of additional CO2 on plant life. It is called a greenhouse effect for a reason. It's quite possible the equatorial belt could heat up to where it's uninhabitable by humans but overrun by jungle rather than desert.
- baxtr 2y agoWhile I have some doubts some of your statements your comment still resonates. Unfortunately, we live in an “Excel world”. The predominant thinking is that our highly complex world can be modeled into an excel sheet. And based on the outputs we should make decisions. This approach mostly ignores the second order effects you describe.
- idunnoman1222 2y agoClimate change predicts a warmer wetter world The author just didn’t know this
- Qem 2y agoThe issue is, the locations where most humans live today, grew historically from the best spots our ancestors could find in the whole planet, taking many factors in consideration: proximity to water bodies, good climate, good agricultural lands, adequate rainfall, et cetera. These are not random locations, they grew around the best spots available. If climate changes, they tend to regress toward the mean, diminishing carrying capacity. Other places may even improve, from the POV of human habitability, but statistically those will not be the same we have a lot of people living today, but places like siberia, that historically were population voids, prompting the need for mass migration and mass resettlement in a world that is already full of borders, and all the associated problems this entails.
- paulddraper 2y agoWorlds within worlds
- Bluestein 2y ago"Four seasons in one day / Laying in the depths of your imagination / Worlds above and worlds below / Sunshine on the black clouds hanging over the domain ..."