[extropy-chat] the structure of randomness

Russell Wallace russell.wallace at gmail.com
Sat Dec 31 02:38:01 UTC 2005


On 12/31/05, Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
>
> I vaguely remember a SF story where some beings figure out they are
> in a sim by detecting such anisotropy.  Anyone remember the tale, the
> reasoning and have some ideas as to whether something like that might
> be applicable here?
>

I haven't come across any story like that... my guess for what it's worth is
that the reasoning isn't applicable here, on the following grounds:

Simulating the entire visible universe would require an impractically large
amount of computation. Therefore the simulation would have to dynamically
adjust level of detail, e.g. it wouldn't simulate every atom in the world,
only those individual atoms that were being scanned with an STM or suchlike.
But the level of detail adjustment would therefore have to notice when
experiments were being done, and give the result that would be expected if
everything were calculated to infinite precision, so the anomaly shouldn't
have shown up here.

(This isn't an ironclad proof of course - one could postulate an entity with
enough computing power to _almost_ exactly simulate every atom, for example
- but it strikes me as a reasonable line of argument.)

- Russell
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