Comments on: Getting commented out might be worse than getting rebooted. https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/ Mon, 07 Mar 2011 03:53:31 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.8 By: Keith Harwood https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500218 Mon, 07 Mar 2011 03:53:31 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500218 Many years ago I wrote a posting to sci.physics on this regard. IIRC it included the following observations.

Finite speed of light: A programming trick to avoid overflow in calculating velocities.

Uncertainty principle: Position and momentum held in the one finite data structure. The more precision required for one, the less available for the other.

Black holes: Underflow not properly handled; a bug.

Hawking radiation: Rounding errors when numbers become denormalised near a black hole.

Clairvoyance: Restored from checkpoint earlier in the simulation; some global variables not properly cleared and contain information from later.

There was more besides, but this is all I can remember.

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500217 Sun, 06 Mar 2011 16:03:39 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500217 Timberwolf: Actually, on a separate but related matter, I was thinking how cool it would be to simply re-write Lovecraft’s Cthulhu stories and removing (and totally redefining) the deeply offensive racist trope. His problem is not like Twain’s “N-word” but rather the total denigration of a huge portion of humanity. It could be done so differently…. It is very tempting. The stories are not that long. Its just a text file sitting there on my hard drive screaming out for anthropological reinterpretation. It is calling me. Calling . Ever calling .

]]> By: Timberwoof https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500216 Sun, 06 Mar 2011 06:46:00 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500216 I fool about on Second Life form time to time. (Okay, just about every day to unwind from work.) It is a simulated 3D space with different kinds of matter (phanton, monphysical, physical, avatars, particles) and a very strange flow of time. I happen to know that interaction between objects is mediated by scripts or by the physics engine â?¦ but how would an inhabitant of Second Life know that?

Second Life has a Turing Complete programming language that has no arrays or data structures, just lists. The Wikipedia article on Turing Completeness says that anything that can implement a Turing Machine is one â?¦ since the universe can implement a Turing Machine, it is reasonable to say it is one.

Implementing a Second Life simulator in LSL would probably crash the sim. What would happen if you tried to simulate the universe in the universe? Would it crash?

On science fiction: Good science fiction has to be good science (with the expected willing suspension of disbelief for certain common tropes) and good fiction. That last bit means it has to be abut peopleâ??or, at any rate, characters the reader can identify with and care about. So go ahead and write about your tentacled behemoth â?¦ but write about how it would affect the sanity of a fundamentalist preacher from Nebraska, and how certain investigators would inevitably stumble upon some very weird facts.

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500215 Sat, 05 Mar 2011 17:14:25 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500215 I’d like to write science fiction some time but there are two problems. 1) I’m told that you can’t have the same theme twice. So, I could never write a story about a tentacled ancient alien beomoth thingie that hibernates under the south Pacific but taps into the vast human subconsciousness even though it (the beast) existed before humans existed. Etc. and 2) I assume that one must be much more read up in a genra than I am to write in it.

And I don’t see how number 2 does not cause number 1 to happen, yet without number 2, it would be impossible to systematically avoid nuber 1.

Of course, I question the validity of assertion 1. There is almost nothing in Harry Potter that is original yet it is brilliant and successful fiction. Perhaps writing for a juvi audiences relaxes the second requirement.

]]> By: Andrew G. https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500214 Sat, 05 Mar 2011 12:15:40 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500214 This argument is played with (not as a major theme) in Banks’ The Algebraist, in which the official state religion of the Mercatoria has as its overt objective the disruption of any such simulation by getting everyone to believe in its existence.

]]> By: howard.peirce https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500213 Sat, 05 Mar 2011 07:03:22 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500213 It gets even shorter than that, Jackson, if you want it.

]]> By: Benton Jackson https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500212 Sat, 05 Mar 2011 06:08:25 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500212 Jack Chalker wrote a few stories along that line. The shortest is the single-book “The Devil Will Drag You Under”. The longest is the Well World series.

]]> By: Tree https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500211 Sat, 05 Mar 2011 05:36:51 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500211 Our limited senses give us only a tiny glimpse of objective reality. We reach (the scientific method is still one of our best tools) but mostly we live in a consensual hallucination.

The edges are there; we just agree not to see them.

(evil grin)

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500210 Sat, 05 Mar 2011 05:03:10 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500210 twpenn, thanks, that’s it.

Mums the word.

]]> By: twpenn52 https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500209 Sat, 05 Mar 2011 04:59:44 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/03/04/getting-commented-out-might-be/#comment-500209 You’re talking about Bostrom’s Simulation Argument.

ABSTRACT: This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a â??posthumanâ? stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

It’s interesting to think about. There’s no reason that this has to be the “real” universe I guess.

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