> It seems intuitive to me that something that can simulate our universe could, for instance, quickly compute every possible chess game Some quick googling gi

> It seems intuitive to me that something that can simulate our universe could, for instance, quickly compute every possible chess game Some quick googling gives me an estimate of 10^123 possible chess games and only 10^82 atoms in the observable universe. Our intuition about how large numbers get is poor at best. While your example of chess is a small enough that you may be correct, the way that the number of possibilities grow for more complex system means it is quite plausible to simulate a system you can't predict without running the simulation. > Intelligence doesn't necessarily mean sentience, it just means the ability to process information. "Intelligence" is a loose term, but it is more that just processing throughput. If super intelligent AI were to develop inside a simulation, it could easily be the kind of chaotic and emergently complex system that could only be predicted by actually running that simulation. Thus, to protect against an such an AI escaping would require knowing a set of detectable necessary milestones and halting the simulation if those are reached. In deed, I would argue that some of our LLMs are direct evidence that you can create and run complex models that have opaque inner workings.