cousin_it comments on Open Thread June 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: komponisto 07 June 2010 08:37AM

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Comment author: cousin_it 08 June 2010 07:50:03PM *  1 point [-]

Yeah, but would a binary tree of simulated worlds "converge" as we go deeper and deeper? In fact it's not even obvious to me that a stack of worlds would "converge": it could hit an attractor with period N where N>1, or do something even more funky. And now, a binary tree? Who knows what it'll do?

Comment author: ocr-fork 08 June 2010 08:32:24PM 1 point [-]

In fact it's not even obvious to me that a stack of worlds would "converge": it could hit an attractor with period N where N>1, or do something even more funky.

I'm convinced it would never converge, and even if it did I would expect it to converge on something more interesting and elegant, like a cellular automata. I have no idea what a binary tree system would do unless none of the worlds break the symmetry between A and B. In that case it would behave like a stack, and the story assumes stacks can converge.