Re:Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation
by wongarsu on Wednesday March 22, 2017 @12:00PM
(#13931984)
>It must be possible to build a computer powerful enough to simulate the universe.
That's not a requirement. You only have to produce something that leads to the same observations as a fully computed universe.
You don't need to simulate some distant galaxy until somebody looks at it. At that point you need to show it in a plausible state with a plausible history. And if your simulation runs on tweaked rules of physics that make that kind of stuff easier, nobody inside the simulation would be able to tell. This is also a valid way to explain a lot of the weirdness of quantum theory. Experiments where an observation now influences what happened in the past make perfect sense if that past was only generated once it was observed.
As far as we know, the 'real' universe has none of that quantum weirdness, and somebody just introduced those rules in our simulation to reduce the resource demand of the simulation.
That's not a requirement. You only have to produce something that leads to the same observations as a fully computed universe.
You don't need to simulate some distant galaxy until somebody looks at it. At that point you need to show it in a plausible state with a plausible history. And if your simulation runs on tweaked rules of physics that make that kind of stuff easier, nobody inside the simulation would be able to tell. This is also a valid way to explain a lot of the weirdness of quantum theory. Experiments where an observation now influences what happened in the past make perfect sense if that past was only generated once it was observed.
As far as we know, the 'real' universe has none of that quantum weirdness, and somebody just introduced those rules in our simulation to reduce the resource demand of the simulation.