8 ms·
And perhaps someday we'll get to meet the great programmer in the sky the developed the simulation we are living in and we will ask him why he designed it that
by zw123456 11y ago
And perhaps someday we'll get to meet the great programmer in the sky the developed the simulation we are living in and we will ask him why he designed it that way and he will say something like "oh I just wanted to optimize the code so I simply excluded reality subroutines when there were no beings looking. I just never thought you guys would notice. As soon as I saw that you guys noticed the flaw, I was going to load a patch but then the confusion it was causing with the simulated beings became interesting and so I just left it in as an accidental feature of the game."
Meh, but probably not.
- yummybear 11y agoReality frustrum culling?
- paraiuspau 11y ago^ This
- hagmonk 11y agoI kind of love the idea that it's an optimization because the universe would have a shitty frame rate if light's quantum state wasn't lazily evaluated based on whether anyone's viewport was aimed at it.
- stingraycharles 11y agoIn other words, reality is lazily evaluated and is written in Haskell ?
- reinhardt 11y agoNot really, most of it is just hacked together with perl: https://xkcd.com/224/ https://xkcd.com/224/
- shiggerino 11y agoPerl 6 has lazy evaluation, doesn't it?
- colomon 11y agoLazy lists, anyway. As far as I know there's no built-in support for lazy scalar evaluation.
- marcosdumay 11y agoWhat does Perl 6 not have?
- chromatic 11y agoUsers.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- lambda 11y agoHmm, I figure it's more the the optimizer depends on code not exhibiting undefined behavior, like in C. It's not really the case that it's lazily evaluated, just the the causality gets screwy when you try to observe things in an asynchronous system without any kind of coherent memory model.
- Xophmeister 11y agoReality wouldn't type check.
- jackweirdy 11y agoThe fastest anything can travel is the speed of light, which is the speed perceived when a result is already calculated and held in a CPU cache. For everything else, it must be loaded from RAM, Disk, Network and perhaps also operated upon - which can never be as fast as the speed of light.
- EC1 11y agoBut probably though.
- amelius 11y ago> developed the simulation we are living Well, the way I understand this, is that this result proves that we do NOT live in a simulation. Because if reality does not exist until measured, then we apparently cannot compute reality ahead of time. And if we cannot compute reality ahead of time, it does not exist yet.
- DennisP 11y agoIf the purpose of the simulation is to simulate us, then it would make sense for it to not bother computing anything we don't measure.
- tempodox 11y agoTrue in principle, but you run the risk of premature optimization. Spontaneous changes of will would be impossible.
- eru 11y ago> Spontaneous changes of will would be impossible. We don't even know what (free) will is, yet alone whether anyone has it.
- ak39 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest Quite sure there's a clever quip about this exact thing in terms of bits and bytes, I just haven't walked into that part of the forest yet.
- andy_ppp 11y agoThe equivalent of a memory leak being spooky action at a distance?
- ak39 11y agoNo, I'm quite sure that would be black holes. Edit: I think you're right. Black holes would be the equivalent of a segfault.
- madaxe_again 11y agoWell, if you want to prove the simulation argument, all you have to do is simulate a reality for an individual at any time-dilation you like. With the parallel compute capabilities we are increasingly growing, simulating a small section of the universe at a large time-dilation should be within our grasp sooner than we think.
- visarga 11y agoThere is a limit to the total computation that can be done in the universe or with a certain limited energy/volume of space. It's caused by the slowness of signals traveling at light speed. They say probably a black hole is the best computational engine there is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_to_computation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_to_computation
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoIt's all fun and games until your solution blows up.
- madaxe_again 11y agoRight, but you don't need to simulate an entire universe, just what's observable.
- antimagic 11y agoI always find it fascinating at just how much of our fundamental physics ends up being constraints on information movement. The laws of thermodynamics are about entropy, general relativity puts constraints on the movement of information (for example, Spooky Action as a Distance(tm) is faster than light, but you can't transmit information with it), the Uncertainty Principle puts limits on how much information you can have on a given system. Information information everywhere you look in fundamental physics. It does make me wonder why.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoIt's hard to imagine a universe with infinite resolution. You'd effectively have an infinite number of bits in an infinitely dense space, which would potentially require infinite energy to flip. But I suspect (on no basis whatsoever, except the fact that all previous metaphors have been wrong) that the "universe = Turing machine model" is wrong in some fundamental ways. I have no idea what the universe is, but I'm open to the possibility that it isn't just an information processing system.
- nicwolff 11y agoQuantum loop gravity theory suggests a resolution of 1.61619926 × 10^-35 meters, the Planck length.
- onnoonno 11y agoAgreed, it just feels inadequate to me, too. Information theory is a hammer ... and now everything we can think of (~ information...) looks like a nail. Another hint that maybe the big Turing machine isn't quite cutting it might be the experiments showing that gravity isn't quite like 'just' an entropic force but seems to behave genuinely different.
- joshuahedlund 11y agoI'm fascinated by such things also. I often can't help thinking of God as a programmer, though I don't know how much of that is confirmation bias of my priors as a theist and a programmer. But I've always thought the periodic table and DNA both felt a lot like code...
- caf 11y agoSurely, "As soon as I saw that you guys noticed the flaw, it became part of the ABI and had to be maintained."
- violentvinyl 11y agoOff to be the Wizard by Scott Meyer is a very funny fiction book that is based on the concept of reality being a computer program that hackers can manually manipulate to do cool stuff. It mostly occurs in King Arthur's Court, which happens to be the chosen time and place all these hackers wind up.
- Strilanc 11y agoThat would quite possibly be the worst optimization ever. "Yeah, I could have tracked and updated n values pretty cheaply, but instead I decided to exponentiate an exponentially huge matrix and use that to update a vector containing 2^n complex numbers associated with the possible assignments of the original n bits. Also, you should use bogosort. It's the best."
- misnome 11y agoThat is assuming that whatever reality our simulation was running in followed the same rules.
- Strilanc 11y agoOf course. I used that assumption because it was also implicit in the original claim. If we don't have any idea what the top-level rules are, then claiming quantum mechanics is an optimization artifact falls a bit flat. If the top-level rules are classical-ish, then quantum mechanics is expensive instead of cheap. If the top-level rules are quantum-ish, then that begs the question of why we thought quantum implied simulated. If the top-level rules are totally different... then there's not really much to be concluded.
- sideshowb 11y agoMaybe the 2^n version is necessary to support consciousness?
- mesozoic 11y agoYeah but maybe they know how to make P=NP