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Comment by simonh

The problem for me is the fidelity of the simulation. It’s like running a simulation of the hardware of a computer on the computer itself. eeven if you devote all of the computer’s resources, the simulation will run incredibly slowly. If you run the simulation in a fraction of the real hardware’s resources, the simulation will either have to be extremely crude and unrealistic, or equally extremely slowly. At which point, why would anyone do this?

A simulation like GTA is only useful because it is staggeringly crude, but the goals of the simulation are commensurately staggeringly modest. I just don’t see how running a simulation of our universe, in our universe, at high enough fidelity to appear real even under detailed scientific analysis, could be useful or worthwhile.

I’d like to see a more credible and compelling proposal than hand waved ‘history simulation’. What’s the point of a history simulation that runs many times slower than real time? If it’s low fidelity, it will also be low accuracy, so why simulating at the physics level at all? I don’t see how it would give useful results.

parent simonh 8 years ago

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