Comment on Crazy Ideas Thread, December 2015

Sat, 05 Dec 2015 23:49:45 GMT

I was thinking more like a random power surge, programming error,or political coup within our simulation that happened to shut down the aspect of our program that was hogging resources. If the programmers want the program to continue, it can.

You're right - branch (2) should be "we don't keep running run more than one". We can launch as many as we like.

The single actor is not going to experience every aspect of the simulation in full fidelity, so a low-res simulation is all that is needed. (The actor might think that it is a full simulation, and may have correctly programmed a full simulation, but there is simply no reason for it to actually replicate either the whole universe or the whole actor, as long as it gives output that looks valid).

That would buy you some time. If a single-agent simulation is say 10^60 times cheaper than a whole universe (roughly the number of elementary particles in the observable universe ?), then that gives you about 200 doubling generations before those single-agent simulations cost as much as much as a universe.

Unless the space of all practically different possible lives of the agent is actually much smaller ... maybe your choices don't matter that much and you end up playing out a relatively small number or attractor scripts. You might be able to map out that space efficiently with some clever dynamic programming.

Discuss