A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Everything (1999)

Re:A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Ev... by jatsign on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @09:14AM (#14097296)

"Several of the Great Programmer’s universes will feature another Great Programmer who programs another Big Computer to run all possible universes. Obviously, there are infinite chains of Great Programmers. If our own universe allowed for enough storage, enough time, and fault-free computing, then you could be one of them."

Loved that line.

I do not understand this main point of the article. Perhaps someone can explain?

"On the other hand, computing just one particular universe’s evolution (with, say, one particular instance of noise), without computing the others, tends to be very expensive, because almost all individual universes are incompressible, as has been shown above. More is less!"

It seems the point is that the program to compute all universes is short, while the program to compute one particular universe is long. But surely runtime is greater in the former?

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Re:A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Ev... by wu-ikkyu on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @10:13AM (#14097847)

>"Several of the Great Programmer’s universes will feature another Great Programmer who programs another Big Computer to run all possible universes. Obviously, there are infinite chains of Great Programmers."

This is comparable to the metaphor of Indra's Net, as described by Alan Watts:

>"Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image."

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Re:A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Ev... by jrimbault on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @09:54AM (#14097671)

At the beginning:

> Time. The Great Programmer does not worry about computation time. Nobody presses Him.

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Re:A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Ev... by jatsign on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @10:06AM (#14097794)

Ok, thought it might refer to that. So "expensive" is the length of the program and nothing else.

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Re:A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Ev... by zebrafish on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @10:14AM (#14097863)

Probably need a definition of expensive here.

I'm taking a shot in the dark, but our state is "finite" and given the current state, there are infinitely many universes which are computable from the current state?

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