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Reading Game of Life descriptions feels like reading papers about quantum physics :) Which creates some disturbing ideas about our reality.
by maushu 14y ago
Reading Game of Life descriptions feels like reading papers about quantum physics :)
Which creates some disturbing ideas about our reality.
- stevenrace 14y agoPerhaps 'intriguing' is the better term. I'd implore everyone to spend a few rainy weekends trudging through Mandelbrot's 'The Fractal Geometry of Nature'[1] and Wolfram's 'A New Kind of Science'[2]. Both are rather terse, but I found both added a whole new depth of analogy in the way I see the Universe(s). It's easy to be dismissive of Stephen Wolfram for his general asshat'ery and Benoit isn't around to champion his notions in the broader sense. But if we are to take reductivism to it's extreme, it's worth exploring emergent patterns with a bit more wonderment. [1] http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Fractal_Geometry_of_Nature.html?id=0R2LkE3N7-oC http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Fractal_Geometry_of_... [2] http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html
- AngrySkillzz 14y agoI don't know if one could call NKS terse, at over 1000 pages. It was a very enjoyable and mildly enlightening read, I'd recommend it, but I'd really like to see his theories fleshed out in a more formal way. It was a bit heavy on conjecture and speculation for me.
- mck- 14y ago"What is the Game of Life"
- lukifer 14y agoWhen discussing the idea that our universe is simulated, often the assumption is that it's an experiment by aliens or somesuch. But recently I've started to wonder if our parent universe is nearly identical to our own, and we are one of millions of virtual Earths used for political and economic predictions, because if (when) we could, that's exactly what we would do.
- geoffschmidt 14y agoIf true, this has an interesting implication - if our parent universe bothers to do it, it probably means they get useful information from it. That means that the recursion eventually terminates, that eventually in some great great grandchild universe they are able to produce the seed of the answer to whatever the original question was, rather than start another simulation.
- anateus 14y agoMy intuition is that the recursion shouldn't hurt getting useful results, even if the simulation was allowed to proceed past the point where such a simulation was developed (which they may not have), in a manner akin to the resolution of Zeno's Paradox. Though there's likely a bound on how many layers deep we can go, but my quantum information theory isn't what it used to be so I have to hand wave my conjectures.
- philh 14y ago> Though there's likely a bound on how many layers deep we can go Yes. The universe only has so much computing power, and any universe we simulate will have less.
- pirateking 14y agoDoes this depend on the universe having a finite amount of mass or what?
- xyzzyz 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound
- pirateking 14y agoThanks. Any recommended books for a soft introduction to these concepts?