LINK: Videogame with a very detailed simulated universe

polymathwannabe

"In one sense, because of the game’s procedural design, the entire universe exists at the moment of its creation. In another sense, because the game only renders a player’s immediate surroundings, nothing exists unless there is a human there to witness it."

"Through the use of procedural generation, No Man’s Sky ensures that each planet will be a surprise, even to the programmers. Every creature, AI-guided alien spacecraft, or landscape is a pseudo-random product of the computer program itself. The universe is essentially as unknown to the people who made it as it is to the people who play in it—and ultimately, it is destined to remain that way."

More at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/artificial-universe-no-mans-sky/463308/

More at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/artificial-universe-no-mans-sky/463308/

At least there was an interesting part reminiscent of Eliezer's Universal Fire:

Eliezer:

Matches catch fire because of phosphorus - "safety matches" have phosphorus on the ignition strip; strike-anywhere matches have phosphorus in the match heads. Phosphorus is highly reactive; pure phosphorus glows in the dark and may spontaneously combust. (Henning Brand, who purified phosphorus in 1669, announced that he had discovered Elemental Fire.) Phosphorus is thus also well-suited to its role in adenosine triphosphate, ATP, your body's chief method of storing chemical energy. ATP is sometimes called the "molecular currency". It invigorates your muscles and charges up your neurons. Almost every metabolic reaction in biology relies on ATP, and therefore on the chemical properties of phosphorus.

If a match stops working, so do you. You can't change just one thing.

The surface-level rules, "Matches catch fire when struck," and "Humans need air to breathe," are not obviously connected. It took centuries to discover the connection, and even then, it still seems like some distant fact learned in school, relevant only to a few specialists. It is all too easy to imagine a world where one surface rule holds, and the other doesn't; to suppress our credence in one belief, but not the other. But that is imagination, not reality. If your map breaks into four pieces for easy storage, it doesn't mean the territory is also broken into disconnected parts. Our minds store different surface-level rules in different compartments, but this does not reflect any division in the laws that govern Nature.

We can take the lesson further. Phosphorus derives its behavior from even deeper laws, electrodynamics and chromodynamics. "Phosphorus" is merely our word for electrons and quarks arranged a certain way. You cannot change the chemical properties of phosphorus without changing the laws governing electrons and quarks.

If you stepped into a world where matches failed to strike, you would cease to exist as organized matter.

Reality is laced together a lot more tightly than humans might like to believe.

From the article:

The team programmed some of the physics for aesthetic reasons. For instance, Duncan insisted on permitting moons to orbit closer to their planets than Newtonian physics would allow. When he desired the possibility of green skies, the team had to redesign the periodic table to create atmospheric particles that would diffract light at just the right wavelength.

“Because it’s a simulation,” Murray stated. “there’s so much you can do. You can break the speed of light—no problem. Speed is just a number. Gravity and its effects are just numbers. It’s our universe, so we get to be Gods in a sense.”

Even Gods though, have their limitations. The game’s interconnectivity means that every action has a consequence. Minor adjustments to the source code can cause mountains to unexpectedly turn into lakes, species to mutate, or objects to lose the property of collision and plummet to the center of a planet. “Something as simple as altering the color of a creature,” Murray noted, “can cause the water level to rise.”

I think most proceduraly generated games aren't that deeply interconnected with regard to their laws of physics.

I think most proceduraly generated games aren't that deeply interconnected with regard to their laws of physics.

It's also not clear to me if this is the result of good coding or bad coding. (If you've seen people play around with ROM memory tricks, that's what I have in mind; changing a bit that's used in multiple places for multiple things is different from "we adjusted Planck's constant and now the periodic table looks different because the energy levels come out differently.")

0V_V10y

This is a press release though, lots of games were advertised with similar claims that don't live up to expectation when you actually play them. The reason is that designing an universe with simple and elegant physical laws sounds cool on paper but it is very hard to do if you want to set an actually playable game in it, since most combinations of laws, parameters and initial conditions yield uninteresting "pathological" states. In fact this also applies to the laws of physics of our universe, and it is the reason why some people use the "fine tuning" argument to argue for creationism or multiple universes. I'm not an expert game programmer, but if I understand correctly, in practice these things use lots of heuristics and hacks to make them work.