my thought exactly. There's no way processor speed can continue at its current pace to that point. It would have to be nearly infinately fast to simulate all the 10000000000000000000000000000000000's of atoms i can see right now, and even put an electron microscope up to and see formations of. There's just too much to simulate, that is, of course judging that this person is saying that WE will be able to do it eventually. I don't doubt that it's possible that processors are a lot faster beyond the matri
Well, you see, the funny thing is that you don't need to simulate the atoms at all. All that you need to simulate visually is the smallest object a person can resolve with his unadied eyes. Everything else is simply mapped on top of that.
For touch, you just simulate the smallest texture difference that a human can feel. For sound, all you need to do is simulate the sounds that a human can hear.
All of these would need to have a certain safely margin to account for people whose senses are better than others, but all that you really have to feed the brain is sense data. As long as it is input propperly,
Now, you would need to physicaly simulate things, but you can reduce the complexity of a model arbitrarily if you are willing to sacrifice quality. The computer detects that we don't need high quality simulations of tables, so it only simulates where the corners would be and fills the rest in as a polygon.
Of course, all of this assumes that you have a more-or-less sentient computer. It would have to be able to decide when we don't need obscenely high quality simulations in order to save its processor power. That wouldn't require true sentience, but it would take quite a bit of clever AI programming.
All of this is a gross simplification. It would still be impossible with modern computing methods because it would require a computer larger than Jupiter, and that's not even with a power source.
As long as it is input propperly, the brain shouldn't be able to tell the difference between reality and the simulated world.
Especially if the computer is programmed with the assumption that the brain should not be allowed to be aware of the LOD (wow, I never thought I'd use that term in philosophical debate).
BTW, anyone with keen interest in tihs topic with a good sci-fi tastes have just gotta read greg egans "Permutation City". Its a classic.
Absolutely with you on the Greg Egan "Permutation City" recommendation. I just finished it a week ago, and it was brilliant. Very thought provoking. Saw it mentioned in the recent Scientific American article on multiple universes.
The brain does not see the "real" world in real time. In fact it is well known that there is a half second delay between perception of an event and realisation by the mind. Interestingly the brain fudges our perception of time etc so we don't notice. What else could it be "designed" to ignore? Seems the EASIEST of all solutions.
Incorrect. For a more primitive being, perhaps animals at the zoo, such an environment would suffice. However, if you are creating a virtual world where the smallest resolution is only a few microns, you will inevitably run into problems when the intelligent beings of that world attempt to use science to learn. If our world were virtual, and had no detail below 10 microns, or a tenth of one, or a thousandth, scientists with knowledge of what should be, would notice. Experiments could be devised using
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Sunday June 01, 2003 @05:32AM (#6088913)
Well, reality is what we perceive. A computer can only simulate worlds which are less complex than the world in which the computer exists, but if the simulation is closed, its inhabitants have no way of proving that it's a simulation. They simply have no way of knowing how things are in the real world. Even bugs in the simulation would appear as an empirically found law of physics to them. A laser in such a world would not exist except as a function of the basic elements that exist in the simulation. However, such a simulation would obviously need to either be seeded without science and develop it by itself or overthrow the science it was seeded with.
A computer can only simulate worlds which are less complex than the world in which the computer exists
Not necessarily. Remember, the computer is only simulating the complex world, it doesn't have to implement it. Only things which we look at and focus our attention on need to be simulated. The far side of the moon need not be simulated, for example. It is possible, even in today's virtual reality type video games to create the illusion of worlds much more complex than the program really deals with. Y
Well, if "this" is a simulation then chances are that it is not perfect. In this case someone *will* eventually find a problem. Providing that the creators are not perfect, they could never create a flawlessly closed simulation.
Buffer overflows == Wormholes? Null pointers == Black holes?
You are totally right about perception. It would be possible to simulate a different matrix world for each person without much difficulty. All you need to simulate at one time in a world is whatever can be seen, touches, heard, smelled, or tasted but each person. Much of the world could be stored database style and not pulled up untill someone needs to experiance it.
Also, as for the inhabitants of the matrix using science to discover the fact that would also be easy to prevent. The computers simply need to
Surely the results of such experiments could be faked. For example, it could be simple to build a 'matrix' where the value of PI could be, say, 5, or where Newton was correct and light permeated space the instant it was emitted and mass had not effect on time.
Hell, there are limits to our own understanding of both the extremely small and the extremely large. What if those limits are not that far from the limits of our "simulation"? How would you tell? Build bigger accelerators/telescopes? How big would they need to be?
Our knowledge of "what should be" is based purely on obseravtion. We're always testing the boundaries of our knowledge. But who's to say that when we delve deeper into the depths of the cosmos we won't discover a message:
"game over, insert coins to play again."
or
"Hi, this is God, I'm not in right now, please leave a message."
how very euclidean of you. there are plenty of 2D geometries where the circumference of a locus equidistant from a point is not 2PI times that distance.
Let's imagine a sphere, and a two-dimensional being who lives on that sphere. If that two-dimensional being were to draw a circle (by taking a point, then marking all points a certain distance from that point) the ratio of radius to circumfrence is not necessarialy 2pi.
If it's a small circle on a large sphere, then the ratio is very near to 2pi, but if it's a large circle on a small sphere, then the ratio goes up. For example, imagine that our 2D friend draws a circle from the "north pole" of his sphere to
Would it not be more correct to say that there are 2D geometries in which pi does not exist, because in them the ratio of circumference to distance is variable? If so, then your criticism of the parent post fails. He was right to attack the naive notion expressed in his parent post that we could easily construct a simulation in which pi is 5.
You're right, I'm sure such changes would have drastic effects on the type of universe inside the simulation. Mathematics would remain the same, but Physics would be different (maybe just a hint of green?). But if you were born in such an environment (assuming, of course, you could be), life wouldn't seem so strange subjectively. Although, to an observer living in a "universe" with different rules that environment might seem quite strange. There's no real reason why the universe inside the Matrix looked som
The Anonymous Coward's post starts out strong, with the most profound comment in the thread, but weakens as it proceeds. Pi cannot logically be other than what it is. To even speak of pi being equal to, say, 5 is to speak incoherently. Not just incorrectly, but incoherently. A simulation cannot just 'set pi to equal 5'. Such a simulation could not be written, and it could not run. It's not just that things would be "so different".
Even with its flaws, though, it still should be moderated up as Intere
Why not? Pi is only ~3.14159 in flat space. In curved geometry (like on the surface of a sphere) the ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumfrence can be not equal to pi in "flat space" or even variable, depending on the size or location of the circle.
I suggest reading Feynman's Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces (or, even better, the complete Lectures on Physics); they can be tough going, but you will come out with a solid understanding of the basics of relativity. Note that they were written
Your argument is bullshit. Pi is the ratio of circumfrence to diameter of a circle, nothing more. It may show up in other places; this is coincidence. I was merely pointing out how the ratio of diameter to circumfrence could be =! ~3.14159.
This is the definition of pi. Pi may be a useful tool in other equations, but that doesn't change its definition.
If our world were virtual, and had no detail below 10 microns, or a tenth of one, or a thousandth, scientists with knowledge of what should be, would notice
Surely it would be less cyle intensive to only run that kind of software when such thing were being measured or observed. They're entirely likely to figure out how to counteract Heisenberg in the next version.
Incorrect. All that needs to be simulated is what you actually perceive. In modern games, the engine calculates what can and can't be seen and doesn't draw the things that can't be seen. A simulation would use a much more sophisticated version of that algorithm. If you're looking through a microscope, microbes are individual simulated. If you aren't looking through the microscope, then they aren't simulated, or are simulated in the aggregate to calculate gross effects that might be perceivable (such as tainted meat causing food poisoning.)
Remember, the simulation has to know exactly what you're doing and what you're perceiving in order to feed the information to your brain. If you turn your head, that isn't a physical motion. The simulation detects the impulses that indicate you desire to turn your head, and adjusts your visual and physical feeds to simulate that motion. So it's certainly capable of determining that you are peering through a microscope and adjusting the level of detail accordingly. How detailed is the simulation? Precisely as detailed as it needs to be, but no more.
One interesting result of this is that observation would affect the behavior of the universe. Also, changes in the environment, such as the presence of a second slit in a screen, might alter the algorithm used to calculate the behavior of, oh, I don't know, maybe photons.
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Sunday June 01, 2003 @08:12AM (#6089288)
Cause and effect transcend observation. The only reliable way of simulating a world with certain basic rules is to simulate these rules all along, not simplifying them when no one looks. Simplifying the calculations removes information about the state of the simulation. That is most likely going to be detected at some point, and then the rules you want the inhabitants of your simulation to perceive would be invalidated. If you don't simulate all quarks, then the inhabitants will sooner or later realize (sic!) that quarks are not what you want them to be.
Well, it should be modded up, but it's not actually important. Humans will invent cause and effect, even if it doesn't exist. This thread is mostly about humans inability to see outside, and why that negates 'problems' like these.
The scientists are going to try to deduce what-caused-what even if the only actual 'cause' is some Matrix-generating heuristic that doesn't actually always tie to a simple law or rule. It could even be tied totally to something outside the 'Matrix'. For instance, if every other Tu
Certainly, simplifying the calculation removes information about the state of the simulation. So what? We don't have access to any more information than the simulation does; therefore we have no way to prove that the simulation's calculations are incorrect.
Your argument essentially boils down to the claim that we would be able to run our own simulation (either a computerized simulation or a pen-and-paper calculation), and compare the results of it to "reality." However, calculating the future state of a
The idea that a simulation would only need to compute what we observe seems quite wrong.. the simulation would only need to display what we observe, but it would need an internally consistent set of rules, an internal physics if you will, to govern the whole affair. Cause and effect require prediction. It is not enought to sipmly make up a more detailed image/information set on the fly every time someone looks through a telescope or microscope. The person looking through the device will have expectations as
One interesting result of this is that observation would affect the behavior of the universe. Also, changes in the environment, such as the presence of a second slit in a screen, might alter the algorithm used to calculate the behavior of, oh, I don't know, maybe photons.
Only if the simulation is poorly written, which we can't assume. It is not conceptually difficult to imagine that the "zoomed in" parts of reality exactly match the approximation to a fine enough level of detail that we can not tell the d
But in order to assure that observation does not modify the outcome of the simulation, they would need to simulate everything we could ever possibly observe, just so that they could know the exact outcome.
Due to my poor understanding of quantum mechanics, I submit a counterargument to myself: The simulators picked an arbitrary resolution, and decided that if we observed quantum events or anything on that scale or smaller, we *would* change the outcome. That's why observation changes the double slit experim
Don't even need to bring in QM... observe the simple, high-school level formulation of the gas laws, which with only a few more twists works on a wide variety of real gases, and adequately describes the macroscopic behavior of gas with only a few equations, yet this gas consists of trillions of molecules.
Also compare "lazy evaluation" in computer science; if nobodys looking, it doesn't need to be done.
Finally, "observer" is an easy word in QM to get hung up on. "Observer" in QM is any other particle, only
Incorrect. All that needs to be simulated is what you actually perceive. In modern games, the engine calculates what can and can't be seen and doesn't draw the things that can't be seen. A simulation would use a much more sophisticated version of that algorithm. If you're looking through a microscope, microbes are individual simulated. If you aren't looking through the microscope, then they aren't simulated, or are simulated in the aggregate to calculate gross effects that might be perceivable (such as ta
Wrong. A simulation that would be able to fool us must simulate the whole ball of wax. A game engine, to maintain consistency and continuity so that the players do not notice problems, must continue to simulate even what is not currently being viewed.
So it's certainly capable of determining that you are peering through a microscope and adjusting the level of detail accordingly. How detailed is the simulation? Precisely as detailed as it needs to be, but no more.
That reminded me of lossy compression algorithms used for music and video (eg. MP3, MPEG). The ears and eyes can only detect so many sounds and colours. We are able to manipulate more sounds and colours, but we can't actually ear or see them.
Perhaps we only think there is infinite detail, wh
Actually we do know the Universe's smallest "pixel size": the Plank Scale. Who's to say whether this is a computational limit imposed upon our simulation by external beings or a true physical limit?
Also, it isn't actually true that a computer cannot simulate soomething more complex than itself. If time is no object, it can simulate something a million times more complex than itself in a very long period of time. Who's to say that maybe a single second in our simulated world takes a million, maybe even a billion years to compute in "real time"?
Also, it isn't actually true that a computer cannot simulate soomething more complex than itself. If time is no object, it can simulate something a million times more complex than itself in a very long period of time. Who's to say that maybe a single second in our simulated world takes a million, maybe even a billion years to compute in "real time"?
And where is the computer going to store this data that is more complex than itself? Even if you could store the universes data atom for atom in the computer
No human being would notice if you just simulated the surface of the earth, with a few minor sub-simulations for people in airplanes and spaceships, and then something painting a sky.
I don't know why so many people here are assuming some sort of perfect simulation of 'reality'. I mean, that's a perfect justification for the speed of light, right there, easy of simulation.
I work at a computer architecture and networking research lab at a university. I write simulators to simulate more advanced computer architectures that haven't been built yet. I run those simulations on computers I have access to now. Sure, it takes a minute of real time to simulate a milisecond of simulation time, but the "simple" computer is simulating the "complex" comptuer.
This could certainly apply to a simulation of our universe, also. Maybe we're all running in slow motion in our simulation, because it takes a minute of real time to simulate a milisecond of our time.
If this world is a computer simulation, god only knows what the metaworld's computational limits might be. Their physics may be nothing like our physics at all. Googleplex to the googleplex to the googleplex computations per nanosecond might be trivial in that universe.
Indeed, if this universe is simulated, that's a high argument for such power right there.
No, but I assume the computer that simulates this universe has more storage than this universe requires, as, so far as we know, only the Earth and, on occaison, the surrounds, needs to be simulated with any accuracy.
The storage requirements to simulate the Earth are most likely miniscule by the standards of any architecture that could make this simulation. Also, consider the idea put forth by others in this thread. We ASSUME this world is complex. It may be very simple. We can make very accurate and re
What you're referring to is only part of what makes a computer complex. Certainly you can simulate a more complex processor than the one that is running the machine, but you can't simluate a computer with as much or more memory/storage than the one that's simulating it.
This could certainly apply to a simulation of our universe, also. Maybe we're all running in slow motion in our simulation, because it takes a minute of real time to simulate a milisecond of our time.
That might work if our reality were clocked. you're talking about the difference between a slow versus a fast chess game (they are identical), whereas "reality chess" would be a turn-less game, where the players can proceed simultaneously without waiting for the opponent to make a move. That's fundamentally
There's no reason to believe it isn't. Google for "Planck time".
you're talking about the difference between a slow versus a fast chess game (they are identical), whereas "reality chess" would be a turn-less game
Video games are clocked at 60 turns per second, and the player can't tell. The difference between chess and Starcraft is that in Starcraft, the pieces do not move nearly as far in a "turn".
Video games are clocked at 60 turns per second, and the player can't tell. The difference between chess and Starcraft is that in Starcraft, the pieces do not move nearly as far in a "turn".
Ahh, but I have to throw a Heisenberg back at you. "This again emphasizes a subjective element in the description of atomic events, since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer, and we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning."
Godel's theorem in a nut shell: you cant prove inconsistency in any set of axioms within the context of those axioms.
suppose for a moment that this is a simulation with a finite amount of memory to parameterize the "world". the state of this system is propgated from time slice to time slice by some set of finite difference equations. well this means that everything is perfectly self-consistent. if you devise any experiment within the simulation itself to measure any observable then you will discover it is self consistent. The laws of nature a person living there would formulate would in fact be the correct ones for that system. you would never be able to discover an inconsistency.
consider for example QM. basically in a quantum world there ARE limits on resolution. indeed the limits are surprisingly like how one creates a simulation. for example, in any practical 3-D game the voxels of distant objects have larger volumes than the close by ones that you can see more clearly. likewise fast moving objects in the background are less precisely placed from frame to frame while maintaining on average an accurate speed.
its as though someone gridded the game in such a way as to have hyper cubes of constant delta-P time delta-X. hey wadda ya know that's the heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Indeed its easier to simulate a trajectory if you dont have to do it exactly. simply compute the approximate result with error bars and then any time the result is closely inspected you return a different sample from the approximate distribution. Thus one does not have to memo-ize everthing the game player has looked at carefully, you can recreate it on the fly each time something is inspected at high resolution simply by drawing an approximate sample from the distribution. The fact that two looks never quite agree is written off as the "hiesenberg uncertainty principle", or to the QM notion that inspecting an object can change its state.
Another hiesenberg principle is the energy-time uncertaintly (to measure the energy of something precisely takes increasing amounts of time). Again this is in keeping with a simulation. to compute the simulation to increacing levels of precision will take more time.
and remember folks the simulation does not have to run in real time!
Finally to digress a bit. Just suppose for moment the supposition that this is simulation is true. then might it might also be possible that the people doing the simulation are also simulations. and so on ad infinitum. the interesting thing is that at each layer of this onion it seems to me that the plausibility that you live in a simulation increases. this is because with each subsequent layer the plausibility of sufficient computer power prior to extinction improves.
Godel's Theorem came to mind immediately as I read the original post, and then I came across yours and realized you had fleshed out an appropriate response better than I would have been able to, so suffice to say, "*swoon*".
In any case, I'd still like to tack a few things onto that.
Indeed its easier to simulate a trajectory if you dont have to do it exactly. simply compute the approximate result with error bars and then any time the result is closely inspected you return a different sample from the app
Why in god's name expect the meta-universe in which we are a simulation to have the same properties as this one? It may not be quantum mechanics, Einsteinian, no "speed of light", and so on.
So many are arguing how difficult it would be to simulate this universe from within this universe, or from within another universe with identical rules. In a universe without mass, there would be no limit to how fast things could move around, and hence, to computational power.
and remember folks the simulation does not have to run in real time!
Lots of peopel are saying this, and I agree, but I agree the opposite: I believe the simulation runs many times faster than real time.
At first, processing power is slow and you must run simulations slower than real time. However, technology progresses, and eventually the simulation can be run parallel to real time. (As others have said, the simulation does not have to calculate everything, just as Quake doesn't calculate walls and
So at some point we'll have enough processing power to simulate faster than real time.
It is logically impossible to simulate faster than real time. Suppose we build a simulator (hardware + software) that can carry out the calculations of physics in full detail. The amount of matter that this system can simulate must be smaller than the system itself or else the simulation must run slower than real time.
If the simulator could run faster than real time, then we could program it to simulate itself plus
All you are saying is that within this universe you can't construct a simulator that is capable of simulating our entire universe faster than time.
However, it is possible to build a simulator in a more complex universe that simulates our universe faster than time. Our universe is just a gross simplification of the "real world". It might have nothing to do with the "real world" at all. I can create a computer program that animates a 12" x 12" universe of 5 0.5"x0.5" sprites moving in two dimensions at 14
When I was reading the part about the lossless compression, I suddenly wondered what would happen if lossy compression was used. The chair could start rotating, shifting, and/or changing size and shape randomly. That would make for a rather interesting world. You go to sit down only to have your chair randomly spin and zip off and become a part of the wall.
and remember folks, the simulation does not have to run in real time!
Well, this is true for purely simulated selves, but in an actual 'Matrix-movie-like' world, the simulation may need to run in near real-time. Without real-time response, it is likely hard to fool a plugged-in meatspace human. She's likely running and processing in real-(human)-time.
Though the simulators may find a way to distort time for the human, they do have time constraints (i.e. at worst, a human lifetime).
Nope, it's only assuming that they have a lifespan at all.
If there is a true time span in which you *must* render the simulation, then it's real-time. Truly, you may be able to distort (i.e. affect) it, but you've still got time constraints that you have no ability to stop. Expanding their lifetimes by a factor of a thousand doesn't change that you've got real-time constraints, it just buys you some processor breathing room.
Now, if the humans are immortal, and you can distort their perception of time, the
Godel's theorem in a nut shell: you cant prove inconsistency in any set of axioms within the context of those axioms.
Goedel's theorem says no such thing. You can easily prove inconsistency of many sets of axioms.
Think about a system of aximoms which contains A and (not) A.
Goedel's theorem (incompleteness theorem)
roughly says that a non-contradictory system of axioms is never complete.
Well, the first paper deals with the concept of the simulation using omission when details aren't needed. To quote from the paper:
"Moreover, a posthuman simulator would have enough computing power to keep track of the detailed belief-states in all human brains at all times. Therefore, when it saw that a human was about to make an observation of the microscopic world, it could fill in sufficent detail in the simulation in the appropriate domain on an as-needed basis. Should any error occur, the director co
You fail to use your imagination adaquately. Remember, the microscopes and lasers you speak of are all based in this simulated world also. Therefore the same limitations apply to both the measurement tool and the reality they are trying to measure.
I think that everyone should look at this more pragmatically. What difference does it make? None really. If you choose to live your life like this is a big video game, go for it. I'd probably admire you. The problem is that there are lots of people with sm
The fatal flaw in the whole argument is that you presume that you actually need to simulate every bit (or pixel) of the lowest grain of a universe. But you forget that a lot is rule based...I can make a pretty convincing fake of the view through an electron based microscope using a few algorithms and other rules. Reality is quite compressible that way.
In other words, you won'tr need a computer the size of the universe to simulate the universe.
Uh, what if someone builds a device to look at smaller objects than the unaided eye can see?
There are so many ways to do that, that it might conceivably be better to simulate at a lower level than to deal with all the possible special cases, or allow people to detect the flaws.
As for processing limitations, it's might not be impossible if you can underclock the minds of participants - put them in suspended animation or something.
High level emulation. If there is a microscope for you to look through, it is being emulated, then whatever has created the microscope can program it to rewrite everything you look at with it in a way that makes sense to your species.
it would be mind-numbing to write (much less RUN) a program that would fully emulate every atom in the world at all times. all you have to do (ask anyone in movies) is emulate the minumum amount to look realistic on screen. if someone needs to look closer, emulate what they're examining properly, only while they are examining it. Otherwise you can very easily emulate a white box with bumpmaps, rather than the wood, the drywall, the paint, the electricity, and everything else that makes a wall. until someone examines the wall, you can get away with just a white box with paint-like bumpmapping.
Consider the worst case: I make an observation, then I look away and you stop simulating what I don't see. Then I look again and make another observation. What do I see? The more you don't simulate, the more randomness must be perceived, because causality extends through unobserved reality. You have two options: What I see is either random or you simulate everything which has an influence above randomness on what I'm supposed to see (actually that is only one choice: level of randomness). If you start post-
Consider the worst case: I make an observation, then I look away and you stop simulating what I don't see.
Assuming the ones simulating our world even _need_ to recover that small amount of computing power saved when you looked away. Based on what is happening on our planet, in our solar system, and galaxy, computing power is not a factor.
If you knew all the rules of the universe, it might not be that mind-numbing to write a full simulation. Especially if there really is a grand unifying theory. In fact, it would probably be significantly easier to emulate everything properly than adding a bunch of speed hacks.
it would be mind-numbing to write (much less RUN) a program that would fully emulate every atom in the world at all times. all you have to do (ask anyone in movies) is emulate the minumum amount to look realistic on screen.
I dont think that it would be all that mind numbing to simulate every atom. In fact, we have a process to do such a similar thing, and have been doing that for at least 45 years. It's called cellular automation. We use it to model fluid dynamics among other things. THe rules tend to b
all you have to do (ask anyone in movies) is emulate the minumum amount to look realistic on screen.
On the Summer Reading List thread, many slashdotters mentioned The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Within Ch. 6 was a description of how Prime Intellect "rewrote" the Universe, as follows:
"No, you wouldn't. Let me ask you something. If I leave here...if I go back to civilization...does this forest continue to exist?"
"I can leave it running in your absence if you want." Caroline wanted to throw up. Now even the forest wasn't real. Nothing was real. "Don't bother. Get rid of it." Instantly, it disappeared. She was standing in an antiseptically white space so pure and seamless and bright that the eye balked at reporting it to the brain. She was standing on a hard, smooth surface, but it was not visible. There were no shadows. There was no horizon; the floor and the sky looked exactly the same, and there was no transition from one to the other. She might have been standing on the inside of some enormous white ball. Prime Intellect was still there. "What is this?" she asked. "Neutral reality," Prime Intellect said. "The minimum landscape which supports human existence. Actually, not quite the minimum. I could get rid of the floor. But that would have startled you."
So basically, the visual portion of this world would just be like a raytracer running constantly. Whatever the eye can see it simulates and draws; out of the eye, nothing is (and need to be) simulated.
Sure, you can simulate a table with four corners and a wood texture, but what if you try to set fire to it? What if you spill hot water on it, what if you stump out a fag end on it? What if you go at it with a saw? What if you drop a hippo on it? What if you wire it up to the mains, what if you bang a nail into it, what if you drive a bus over it? Can you even *imagine* trying to make your fake table react to all these things in the proper way? You've *got* to get down to the lowest level, because otherwise
Assuming you had the processing power, and the program... you couldn't simulate only what is currently being observed. You must simulate what is currently being observed and everything that *has* been observed and might be double-checked at some time in the future.
Imagine some IBM lab scientist with an electron microscope writes "IBM" in atoms.
Imagine he goes back a year later to read it again for old time's sake and notices that the shape of the letters is slightly different, because the simulator didn't
> it would be mind-numbing to write (much less > RUN) a program that would fully emulate every > atom in the world at all times
Actually it'd be pretty easy.
Just define several arrays of about 10^^300 x 10^^300 x 10^^300 or so, representing in 3-space every possible position in the universe, and start filling 'em up with subatomic molecules, set down the rules (or go deeper, similarly for quantum mechanics) and just check each position against all the others for collision detection, etc.
Since I'm the only person who really exists in the first place, the simulator only needs to emulate to full visual resoluiton the stuff that is in a 10 foot sphere around me. It can diminish resolution outwards from there. It only needs to simulate the people I actually run into.
Really - would you notice if 99% of the people you bump into at the mall were autogenerated 1 second before you looked at them?
Also - the simulation doesn't have to run in real-time.
Then you simulate what would be seen. Everything could be treated as a surface with a varying transparency and a texture mapped on top of it. You wouldn't have to visually simulate anything smaller than the eye could resolve, but if needed, the simulation could simulate portions in more detail.
It would be easier from a programming standpoint to simulate all of the individual atoms, but that would be prohibitively slow. We're talking tens of thousands of years for less than a second of simulation time using conventional computers on anything less than a planetary scale.
Quantum computers and chemical computers could speed it up greatly, but it would still take massive amounts of raw processing power to keep track of all of those atoms, let alone let anything interact with them.
You can never see anything smaller than the smallest dot that your eye can perceive. However, you can design devices to enlarge objects (or increase the resolution of your eye, depending on how you look at it).
One of the huge problems with The Matrix is the question of how people were actually put into it. If anyone had memories of the real world, then they would undoubtedly find a way to pass them on to their children. So, that implies that none of the first generation of Matrix denizens was ever outside the Matrix at any prior point in their lives. Yet they had parents. The programs in the Matrix aren't compassionate at all, so they certainly couldn't have raised the children. Perhaps they had been imprisoned for millennia, but if that were the case, I would have expected the robots to have wiped out the last of the independent humans. Due to the way memories are stored, there is no way to erase specific memories from the human mind without some serious brain damage. We can only stop new ones from forming. Perhaps the robots were able to create synthetic sets of memories for the first parents, but again, how? That would require someone in the Matrix in the first place so that his memories could be copied. Perhaps the first parents were willing subjects? I don't really see that as in The Animatrix, the general populace was destroying the robots in the streets. That would be like southern whites agreeing to be slaves to some blacks during the Civil War. Very few would. Perhaps enough did that they were the first generation.
I believe in one of the Second Renaissance parts, the scene where the robot is sitting as the chairman of the UN and requests human flesh, the Human nations sign away their rights and willingly commit themselves to the first Matrix.
Sorry I'm not more descriptive, but I don't have the DVD on hand to recheck.
hate to nit pick, but your whole theory falls apart when one watches ciphers betrail dealings in the matrix 1. It is rather clearly implied that "our robot masters" have the ability to wipe memories. There are some other problems with your "problem" with the matrix, but I think Ill just stick with K.I.S.S. for this retort.
The first batch could have been "grown" from scratch by the machines, as well, with agents & friends filling in as the adults for the first generation.
But why bother with mind erasure available? Presumably mind memory implantation, too. After all, they can load any skills necessary; memories should be trivial to them.
Due to the way memories are stored, there is no way to erase specific memories from the human mind without some serious brain damage.
Haven't you seen Men in Black? In that movie, Agent Jones (known as "K") showed a darker-skinned Agent Smith (known as "J") a flashy thing called a "neuralizer" that could suppress approximately n days worth of the target's most recent memories.
Couldn't you just put newborns in the simulation originally and simulate parents for them?
Just kill everyone over 12 months old and the problem likely takes care of itself.
The problem with that is that the programs probably wouldn't make good parents. I can just see Agent Smith sealing a baby's mouth to keep it from crying.
Now, you would need to physicaly simulate things, but you can reduce the complexity of a model arbitrarily if you are willing to sacrifice quality. The computer detects that we don't need high quality simulations of tables, so it only simulates where the corners would be and fills the rest in as a polygon.
makes me wonder if you've ever seen a realtime 3D scene, or even a wooden table. what you describe here looks bad on a screen, so i don't think it would be very convincing in a virtual reality.
The simulation can be simplified to the extent that its even possible today. For example, if you take a new born baby and strap some VR goggles to his eyes and a joystick to his hand, and leave him to play Quake for his entire life, he would have no way of knowing that it wasn't real. It doesn't matter that its not an accurate simulation of real life - eg. the pixilation that he'd see when he looked at things close up would just be accepted as reality.
And you don't need to simulate touch at all - just in
All of this is a gross simplification. It would still be impossible with modern computing methods because it would require a computer larger than Jupiter, and that's not even with a power source.
Here you assume that the system running the simulation exists in a world much like the one we experience. It's pretty easy for us to simulate a simple 2D world, for all we know, this is some dumbed-down simulation with 'only' 3 dimensions.
Thanks, I was wondering if I was going to have to bring that up. All these posts about how hard it would be to simulate the universe are full of hubris. Everybody keeps assuming the universe we live in is complex. Maybe it isn't.
> Well, you see, the funny thing is that you don't need to simulate the atoms > at all. All that you need to simulate visually is the smallest object a > person can resolve with his unadied eyes. Everything else is simply mapped > on top of that.
From a programmer's point of view, this is a bad idea. After all, you will need special plugins for every device that aids the eyes. You have to check if any of your simulated physicians invents a tool like a microscope, and then hot-upgrade your simulator
Or mabye that microscope that was invented, for some reason, doesn't work. As long as you were consistent with all the given physics of the simulation, no one would notice.
> Or mabye that microscope that was invented, for some reason, doesn't > work. As long as you were consistent with all the given physics of > the simulation, no one would notice.
I peeked through microscopes myself already, so I take this as proof that we don't live in a simulation. At least not one of those corner-cutting el-cheapo simulations.
Or, wait.. Maybe THEY have temporarily put me into the "extended detail" processing queue back then?
I peeked through microscopes myself already, so I take this as proof that we don't live in a simulation. At least not one of those corner-cutting el-cheapo simulations.
Or, wait.. Maybe THEY have temporarily put me into the "extended detail" processing queue back then?
Heh, so what if we ALL look into a microscope at the same time? Would we notice a slowdown?
I say "no", because each processor cycle would produce the same amount of work. Our perception of how things run would remain the same. The thing run
For touch, you just simulate the smallest texture difference that a human can feel. For sound, all you need to do is simulate the sounds that a human can hear.
or you just adjust the smallest texture difference that a human can feel...but then again, this leaves open tools that circumvent this...
Wait a minute here...why would we have to simulate all that? All we need to simulate is what goes into the brain. A picture of something doesn't go into the brain. If you draw a skill life without having learned how, it won't look anything like the real world. You're brain's not actually perceiving everything; not everything would need simulation. You can simulate things at higher levels than the basic tactile, visual, and auditory, and you'd need even less power, although the programming expertise required
If we already live in a Matrix then we already live by the Architect's rules. It won't matter how good our telescopes or our microscopes are, always our observations are defined by the constants the Matrix Architect chose. We won't be able to trick the master program into showing something that it cannot show. There is no reason to fake physics results since all constants c, pi, h etc. are already arbitrarily defined and the world has been built on top of them. Whatever the Architect missed in his design it
You would indeed need to simulate the "whole shebang". Here's why...
In the universe at large, events take place without our knowledge. The trees do in fact make sounds (as the definition of what a sound is) when they fall in the forest. These "unseen" events are what bring you to your "future". Computer gaming shows this. When you drop your gun at a certain location in the game, then go back for it later, it's still there right? Wrong. In the real world, you never know what "might" happen to real wo
The simulation (if it exists) is betting on the fact that most people who fire bullets randomly don't care where they land. The system might be free to take the bullet and do whatever with it, including recomitting it into mineral ore. It's probably too small to consider proper accounting unless you are in a situation where a) you care about it b) the bullets trajectory implies a landing near something interesting to another part of the simulation.
When you ask, well what happends to the bullet, then you ar
"Be there. Aloha."
-- Steve McGarret, _Hawaii Five-Oh_
and this my friends is why (Score:5, Funny)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful)
For touch, you just simulate the smallest texture difference that a human can feel. For sound, all you need to do is simulate the sounds that a human can hear.
All of these would need to have a certain safely margin to account for people whose senses are better than others, but all that you really have to feed the brain is sense data. As long as it is input propperly,
Now, you would need to physicaly simulate things, but you can reduce the complexity of a model arbitrarily if you are willing to sacrifice quality. The computer detects that we don't need high quality simulations of tables, so it only simulates where the corners would be and fills the rest in as a polygon.
Of course, all of this assumes that you have a more-or-less sentient computer. It would have to be able to decide when we don't need obscenely high quality simulations in order to save its processor power. That wouldn't require true sentience, but it would take quite a bit of clever AI programming.
All of this is a gross simplification. It would still be impossible with modern computing methods because it would require a computer larger than Jupiter, and that's not even with a power source.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
As long as it is input propperly, the brain shouldn't be able to tell the difference between reality and the simulated world.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Insightful)
Especially if the computer is programmed with the assumption that the brain should not be allowed to be aware of the LOD (wow, I never thought I'd use that term in philosophical debate).
BTW, anyone with keen interest in tihs topic with a good sci-fi tastes have just gotta read greg egans "Permutation City". Its a classic.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
The brain already practices self-deception (Score:2)
The brain does not see the "real" world in real time. In fact it is well known that there is a half second delay between perception of an event and realisation by the mind. Interestingly the brain fudges our perception of time etc so we don't notice. What else could it be "designed" to ignore? Seems the EASIEST of all solutions.
recursion (Score:1, Funny)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
Not necessarily. Remember, the computer is only simulating the complex world, it doesn't have to implement it. Only things which we look at and focus our attention on need to be simulated. The far side of the moon need not be simulated, for example. It is possible, even in today's virtual reality type video games to create the illusion of worlds much more complex than the program really deals with. Y
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2, Insightful)
Buffer overflows == Wormholes? Null pointers == Black holes?
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
Also, as for the inhabitants of the matrix using science to discover the fact that would also be easy to prevent. The computers simply need to
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, there are limits to our own understanding of both the extremely small and the extremely large. What if those limits are not that far from the limits of our "simulation"? How would you tell? Build bigger accelerators/telescopes? How big would they need to be?
Our knowledge of "what should be" is based purely on obseravtion. We're always testing the boundaries of our knowledge. But who's to say that when we delve deeper into the depths of the cosmos we won't discover a message:
orRe:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh? (Score:1)
Re:Oh? (Score:2)
If it's a small circle on a large sphere, then the ratio is very near to 2pi, but if it's a large circle on a small sphere, then the ratio goes up. For example, imagine that our 2D friend draws a circle from the "north pole" of his sphere to
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:1)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:and this my friends is why sugarbitch (Score:2)
Differentiate:
Integrate:
Exponentiate:
But you missed my point. PI appears in the period of this equation because the complex plane is isomorphic to R2.
Try, for example drawing a circle on the surface of a sphere. The circumference of the circle will always be less than 2*PI*the distance to at
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:1)
Even with its flaws, though, it still should be moderated up as Intere
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
I suggest reading Feynman's Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces (or, even better, the complete Lectures on Physics); they can be tough going, but you will come out with a solid understanding of the basics of relativity. Note that they were written
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
This is the definition of pi. Pi may be a useful tool in other equations, but that doesn't change its definition.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
Surely it would be less cyle intensive to only run that kind of software when such thing were being measured or observed. They're entirely likely to figure out how to counteract Heisenberg in the next version.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, the simulation has to know exactly what you're doing and what you're perceiving in order to feed the information to your brain. If you turn your head, that isn't a physical motion. The simulation detects the impulses that indicate you desire to turn your head, and adjusts your visual and physical feeds to simulate that motion. So it's certainly capable of determining that you are peering through a microscope and adjusting the level of detail accordingly. How detailed is the simulation? Precisely as detailed as it needs to be, but no more.
One interesting result of this is that observation would affect the behavior of the universe. Also, changes in the environment, such as the presence of a second slit in a screen, might alter the algorithm used to calculate the behavior of, oh, I don't know, maybe photons.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Insightful)
The scientists are going to try to deduce what-caused-what even if the only actual 'cause' is some Matrix-generating heuristic that doesn't actually always tie to a simple law or rule. It could even be tied totally to something outside the 'Matrix'. For instance, if every other Tu
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Interesting)
Your argument essentially boils down to the claim that we would be able to run our own simulation (either a computerized simulation or a pen-and-paper calculation), and compare the results of it to "reality." However, calculating the future state of a
Exactly my thoughts (Score:2)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Insightful)
Only if the simulation is poorly written, which we can't assume. It is not conceptually difficult to imagine that the "zoomed in" parts of reality exactly match the approximation to a fine enough level of detail that we can not tell the d
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
Due to my poor understanding of quantum mechanics, I submit a counterargument to myself: The simulators picked an arbitrary resolution, and decided that if we observed quantum events or anything on that scale or smaller, we *would* change the outcome. That's why observation changes the double slit experim
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
Also compare "lazy evaluation" in computer science; if nobodys looking, it doesn't need to be done.
Finally, "observer" is an easy word in QM to get hung up on. "Observer" in QM is any other particle, only
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Funny)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:1, Funny)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:1)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
That reminded me of lossy compression algorithms used for music and video (eg. MP3, MPEG). The ears and eyes can only detect so many sounds and colours. We are able to manipulate more sounds and colours, but we can't actually ear or see them.
Perhaps we only think there is infinite detail, wh
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:4, Informative)
Also, it isn't actually true that a computer cannot simulate soomething more complex than itself. If time is no object, it can simulate something a million times more complex than itself in a very long period of time. Who's to say that maybe a single second in our simulated world takes a million, maybe even a billion years to compute in "real time"?
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2, Funny)
Who's to say that maybe a single second in our simulated world takes a million, maybe even a billion years to compute in "real time"?
Man, this place looks expensive. I feel like I'm wasting a fortune just standing here.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:1)
And where is the computer going to store this data that is more complex than itself? Even if you could store the universes data atom for atom in the computer
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:1)
No human being would notice if you just simulated the surface of the earth, with a few minor sub-simulations for people in airplanes and spaceships, and then something painting a sky.
I don't know why so many people here are assuming some sort of perfect simulation of 'reality'. I mean, that's a perfect justification for the speed of light, right there, easy of simulation.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful)
This could certainly apply to a simulation of our universe, also. Maybe we're all running in slow motion in our simulation, because it takes a minute of real time to simulate a milisecond of our time.
My friends, my friends, please (Score:1)
Indeed, if this universe is simulated, that's a high argument for such power right there.
Attached storage (Score:1)
the "simple" computer is simulating the "complex" comptuer.
With attached storage. Can a computer with 128 MB of (RAM + attached storage) simulate a computer with 16 GB of (RAM + attached storage)?
Re:Attached storage (Score:2)
The storage requirements to simulate the Earth are most likely miniscule by the standards of any architecture that could make this simulation. Also, consider the idea put forth by others in this thread. We ASSUME this world is complex. It may be very simple. We can make very accurate and re
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
That might work if our reality were clocked. you're talking about the difference between a slow versus a fast chess game (they are identical), whereas "reality chess" would be a turn-less game, where the players can proceed simultaneously without waiting for the opponent to make a move. That's fundamentally
Not clocked? (Score:2, Insightful)
That might work if our reality were clocked.
There's no reason to believe it isn't. Google for "Planck time".
you're talking about the difference between a slow versus a fast chess game (they are identical), whereas "reality chess" would be a turn-less game
Video games are clocked at 60 turns per second, and the player can't tell. The difference between chess and Starcraft is that in Starcraft, the pieces do not move nearly as far in a "turn".
Re:Not clocked? (Score:2)
Ahh, but I have to throw a Heisenberg back at you. "This again emphasizes a subjective element in the description of atomic events, since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer, and we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning."
W
Quantum Mechanics could be simulation artifact. (Score:5, Interesting)
Godel's theorem in a nut shell: you cant prove inconsistency in any set of axioms within the context of those axioms.
suppose for a moment that this is a simulation with a finite amount of memory to parameterize the "world". the state of this system is propgated from time slice to time slice by some set of finite difference equations. well this means that everything is perfectly self-consistent. if you devise any experiment within the simulation itself to measure any observable then you will discover it is self consistent. The laws of nature a person living there would formulate would in fact be the correct ones for that system. you would never be able to discover an inconsistency.
consider for example QM. basically in a quantum world there ARE limits on resolution. indeed the limits are surprisingly like how one creates a simulation. for example, in any practical 3-D game the voxels of distant objects have larger volumes than the close by ones that you can see more clearly. likewise fast moving objects in the background are less precisely placed from frame to frame while maintaining on average an accurate speed.
its as though someone gridded the game in such a way as to have hyper cubes of constant delta-P time delta-X. hey wadda ya know that's the heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Indeed its easier to simulate a trajectory if you dont have to do it exactly. simply compute the approximate result with error bars and then any time the result is closely inspected you return a different sample from the approximate distribution. Thus one does not have to memo-ize everthing the game player has looked at carefully, you can recreate it on the fly each time something is inspected at high resolution simply by drawing an approximate sample from the distribution. The fact that two looks never quite agree is written off as the "hiesenberg uncertainty principle", or to the QM notion that inspecting an object can change its state.
Another hiesenberg principle is the energy-time uncertaintly (to measure the energy of something precisely takes increasing amounts of time). Again this is in keeping with a simulation. to compute the simulation to increacing levels of precision will take more time.
and remember folks the simulation does not have to run in real time!
Finally to digress a bit. Just suppose for moment the supposition that this is simulation is true. then might it might also be possible that the people doing the simulation are also simulations. and so on ad infinitum. the interesting thing is that at each layer of this onion it seems to me that the plausibility that you live in a simulation increases. this is because with each subsequent layer the plausibility of sufficient computer power prior to extinction improves.
My hero *swoon* (Score:2, Interesting)
In any case, I'd still like to tack a few things onto that.
Why in god's name? (Score:1)
So many are arguing how difficult it would be to simulate this universe from within this universe, or from within another universe with identical rules. In a universe without mass, there would be no limit to how fast things could move around, and hence, to computational power.
Why in "god's name"? (Score:1)
Re:Quantum Mechanics could be simulation artifact. (Score:3, Insightful)
Lots of peopel are saying this, and I agree, but I agree the opposite: I believe the simulation runs many times faster than real time.
At first, processing power is slow and you must run simulations slower than real time. However, technology progresses, and eventually the simulation can be run parallel to real time. (As others have said, the simulation does not have to calculate everything, just as Quake doesn't calculate walls and
Accelerated simulation (Score:2)
It is logically impossible to simulate faster than real time. Suppose we build a simulator (hardware + software) that can carry out the calculations of physics in full detail. The amount of matter that this system can simulate must be smaller than the system itself or else the simulation must run slower than real time.
If the simulator could run faster than real time, then we could program it to simulate itself plus
Re:Accelerated simulation (Score:2)
However, it is possible to build a simulator in a more complex universe that simulates our universe faster than time. Our universe is just a gross simplification of the "real world". It might have nothing to do with the "real world" at all. I can create a computer program that animates a 12" x 12" universe of 5 0.5"x0.5" sprites moving in two dimensions at 14
Re:Quantum Mechanics could be simulation artifact. (Score:2)
Re:Quantum Mechanics could be simulation artifact. (Score:2)
Well, this is true for purely simulated selves, but in an actual 'Matrix-movie-like' world, the simulation may need to run in near real-time. Without real-time response, it is likely hard to fool a plugged-in meatspace human. She's likely running and processing in real-(human)-time.
Though the simulators may find a way to distort time for the human, they do have time constraints (i.e. at worst, a human lifetime).
Re:Quantum Mechanics could be simulation artifact. (Score:2)
If there is a true time span in which you *must* render the simulation, then it's real-time. Truly, you may be able to distort (i.e. affect) it, but you've still got time constraints that you have no ability to stop. Expanding their lifetimes by a factor of a thousand doesn't change that you've got real-time constraints, it just buys you some processor breathing room.
Now, if the humans are immortal, and you can distort their perception of time, the
Re:Quantum Mechanics could be simulation artifact. (Score:2)
Goedel's theorem says no such thing. You can easily prove inconsistency of many sets of axioms. Think about a system of aximoms which contains A and (not) A.
Goedel's theorem (incompleteness theorem) roughly says that a non-contradictory system of axioms is never complete.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
"Moreover, a posthuman simulator would have enough computing power to keep track of the detailed belief-states in all human brains at all times. Therefore, when it saw that a human was about to make an observation of the microscopic world, it could fill in sufficent detail in the simulation in the appropriate domain on an as-needed basis. Should any error occur, the director co
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
I think that everyone should look at this more pragmatically. What difference does it make? None really. If you choose to live your life like this is a big video game, go for it. I'd probably admire you. The problem is that there are lots of people with sm
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
The fatal flaw in the whole argument is that you presume that you actually need to simulate every bit (or pixel) of the lowest grain of a universe. But you forget that a lot is rule based...I can make a pretty convincing fake of the view through an electron based microscope using a few algorithms and other rules. Reality is quite compressible that way.
In other words, you won'tr need a computer the size of the universe to simulate the universe.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Insightful)
There are so many ways to do that, that it might conceivably be better to simulate at a lower level than to deal with all the possible special cases, or allow people to detect the flaws.
As for processing limitations, it's might not be impossible if you can underclock the minds of participants - put them in suspended animation or something.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Interesting)
it would be mind-numbing to write (much less RUN) a program that would fully emulate every atom in the world at all times. all you have to do (ask anyone in movies) is emulate the minumum amount to look realistic on screen. if someone needs to look closer, emulate what they're examining properly, only while they are examining it. Otherwise you can very easily emulate a white box with bumpmaps, rather than the wood, the drywall, the paint, the electricity, and everything else that makes a wall. until someone examines the wall, you can get away with just a white box with paint-like bumpmapping.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
Assuming the ones simulating our world even _need_ to recover that small amount of computing power saved when you looked away. Based on what is happening on our planet, in our solar system, and galaxy, computing power is not a factor.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:1)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2, Interesting)
I dont think that it would be all that mind numbing to simulate every atom. In fact, we have a process to do such a similar thing, and have been doing that for at least 45 years. It's called cellular automation. We use it to model fluid dynamics among other things. THe rules tend to b
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:4, Interesting)
On the Summer Reading List thread, many slashdotters mentioned The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Within Ch. 6 was a description of how Prime Intellect "rewrote" the Universe, as follows:
So basically, the visual portion of this world would just be like a raytracer running constantly. Whatever the eye can see it simulates and draws; out of the eye, nothing is (and need to be) simulated.
but what about interaction? (Score:1)
Re:but what about interaction? (Score:2)
You can't simulate *only* the currently observed (Score:1)
Assuming you had the processing power, and the program... you couldn't simulate only what is currently being observed. You must simulate what is currently being observed and everything that *has* been observed and might be double-checked at some time in the future.
Imagine some IBM lab scientist with an electron microscope writes "IBM" in atoms.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:1)
> RUN) a program that would fully emulate every
> atom in the world at all times
Actually it'd be pretty easy.
Just define several arrays of about 10^^300 x 10^^300 x 10^^300 or so, representing in 3-space every possible position in the universe, and start filling 'em up with subatomic molecules, set down the rules (or go deeper, similarly for quantum mechanics) and just check each position against all the others for collision detection, etc.
For all you
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
Since I'm the only person who really exists in the first place, the simulator only needs to emulate to full visual resoluiton the stuff that is in a 10 foot sphere around me. It can diminish resolution outwards from there. It only needs to simulate the people I actually run into.
Really - would you notice if 99% of the people you bump into at the mall were autogenerated 1 second before you looked at them?
Also - the simulation doesn't have to run in real-time.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be easier from a programming standpoint to simulate all of the individual atoms, but that would be prohibitively slow. We're talking tens of thousands of years for less than a second of simulation time using conventional computers on anything less than a planetary scale.
Quantum computers and chemical computers could speed it up greatly, but it would still take massive amounts of raw processing power to keep track of all of those atoms, let alone let anything interact with them.
You can never see anything smaller than the smallest dot that your eye can perceive. However, you can design devices to enlarge objects (or increase the resolution of your eye, depending on how you look at it).
One of the huge problems with The Matrix is the question of how people were actually put into it. If anyone had memories of the real world, then they would undoubtedly find a way to pass them on to their children. So, that implies that none of the first generation of Matrix denizens was ever outside the Matrix at any prior point in their lives. Yet they had parents. The programs in the Matrix aren't compassionate at all, so they certainly couldn't have raised the children. Perhaps they had been imprisoned for millennia, but if that were the case, I would have expected the robots to have wiped out the last of the independent humans. Due to the way memories are stored, there is no way to erase specific memories from the human mind without some serious brain damage. We can only stop new ones from forming. Perhaps the robots were able to create synthetic sets of memories for the first parents, but again, how? That would require someone in the Matrix in the first place so that his memories could be copied. Perhaps the first parents were willing subjects? I don't really see that as in The Animatrix, the general populace was destroying the robots in the streets. That would be like southern whites agreeing to be slaves to some blacks during the Civil War. Very few would. Perhaps enough did that they were the first generation.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:1)
Animatrix and insertion into the first Matrix (Score:1)
Sorry I'm not more descriptive, but I don't have the DVD on hand to recheck.
Re:Animatrix and insertion into the first Matrix (Score:2)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:1)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:1)
But why bother with mind erasure available? Presumably mind memory implantation, too. After all, they can load any skills necessary; memories should be trivial to them.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
The neuralizer and the "other" Agent Smith (Score:1)
Due to the way memories are stored, there is no way to erase specific memories from the human mind without some serious brain damage.
Haven't you seen Men in Black? In that movie, Agent Jones (known as "K") showed a darker-skinned Agent Smith (known as "J") a flashy thing called a "neuralizer" that could suppress approximately n days worth of the target's most recent memories.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:1)
makes me wonder if you've ever seen a realtime 3D scene, or even a wooden table. what you describe here looks bad on a screen, so i don't think it would be very convincing in a virtual reality.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:1, Insightful)
And you don't need to simulate touch at all - just in
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Interesting)
Here you assume that the system running the simulation exists in a world much like the one we experience. It's pretty easy for us to simulate a simple 2D world, for all we know, this is some dumbed-down simulation with 'only' 3 dimensions.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:1)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Insightful)
> at all. All that you need to simulate visually is the smallest object a
> person can resolve with his unadied eyes. Everything else is simply mapped
> on top of that.
From a programmer's point of view, this is a bad idea. After all, you will
need special plugins for every device that aids the eyes. You have to check
if any of your simulated physicians invents a tool like a microscope, and
then hot-upgrade your simulator
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
> work. As long as you were consistent with all the given physics of
> the simulation, no one would notice.
I peeked through microscopes myself already, so I take this as proof that
we don't live in a simulation. At least not one of those corner-cutting
el-cheapo simulations.
Or, wait.. Maybe THEY have temporarily put me into the "extended detail"
processing queue back then?
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
we don't live in a simulation. At least not one of those corner-cutting
el-cheapo simulations.
Or, wait.. Maybe THEY have temporarily put me into the "extended detail"
processing queue back then?
Heh, so what if we ALL look into a microscope at the same time? Would we notice a slowdown?
I say "no", because each processor cycle would produce the same amount of work. Our perception of how things run would remain the same. The thing run
More for my friends, too (Score:1)
Meta-programmer #2: Nah, just keep it simple at the Quantum level and about 10^^80 particles and about 10^^300 possible positions, cubed.
Meta-programmer #1: Good, I wanna get to Mickey D's for lunch.
Get a clue, folks. If this universe is a simulation, then we may conclude the meta-universe:
1. Has physics that allow for a lot more power than we can imagine possible at the moment
2. May have physic
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:1)
> texture difference that a human can feel.
My god, where is the folder with all the Sandra Bullock big wrinkled kissy lips textures? Tank, load it up!
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:1)
If we already live in a Matrix then we already live by the Architect's rules. It won't matter how good our telescopes or our microscopes are, always our observations are defined by the constants the Matrix Architect chose. We won't be able to trick the master program into showing something that it cannot show. There is no reason to fake physics results since all constants c, pi, h etc. are already arbitrarily defined and the world has been built on top of them. Whatever the Architect missed in his design it
You are wrong... (Score:2)
In the universe at large, events take place without our knowledge. The trees do in fact make sounds (as the definition of what a sound is) when they fall in the forest. These "unseen" events are what bring you to your "future". Computer gaming shows this. When you drop your gun at a certain location in the game, then go back for it later, it's still there right? Wrong. In the real world, you never know what "might" happen to real wo
My opinion: (Score:2)
When you ask, well what happends to the bullet, then you ar