Reality as a simulation popularized in The Matrix, and given new life with Elon Musk interviews.
Introduction
A number of us here on steemit have been clamoring and excited over the mainstream interviews with Elon Musk on the possibility that reality is simply a simulation. This was the cornerstone of the movie The Matrix. Many people have likely thought this before, but Elon Musk is a well respected entrepreneur and scientist. That makes many people sit back and think.
Here are a few articles from people that touch upon this subject on steemit.com:
The little religion history forgot... Deism - I mention it at the end of this article. If it is a simulation then it fits with the concept of Deism perfectly.
Are we in a computer simulation? - @spalser
What is the Matrix? - @steemerr
Are you living in a computer simulation? Bostrom theory - @webokv
Simulation Theory - hosted by: Neil deGrasse Tyson - @overlord
Are we living in a Simulation? Elon Musk & Fermi Paradox - @minion
Source: matrix.wikia.com
So what is new about this blog entry?
I'm a gamer, and a game developer. I like to build simulations. So in this one I want to talk a little bit about our simulations which are increasing in complexity. We can extrapolate on reality based upon that. Using this I'll propose some things we might be able to do to detect that we are in a simulation. After all, that is the tricky part. How does the simulation know it is a simulation? This is all speculation and fun mind exercise on my part. Feel free to join in and tear apart my ideas or offer your own.
Simulations in Games
As the computational power of computers increases so does the complexity and more detail in our simulations. This also coincides with our mathematicians and programmers teaming up to come up with better and better ways to create simulated realities on the fly with only a few numbers. This is called Procedural Generation. I will delve into that in some detail further in this article as I believe it may hold some hints of ways we may be able to tell we are in a simulation.
Sim City
- by Maxis. - wikipediaEarly on Maxis came up with the idea of making a game where you basically controlled the construction and management of a city. It had budgets, cars driving around, and even little people. Most of the cars and people were faked by simple sprites (2d images) that would play when there was traffic. They did not track the emotions, or needs of the citizens of this simulated city. They faked it so you the game player would fill in the gaps with your imagination.
Each version that came out would take advantage of new computing power and add details.
Cities Skylines
- Paradox interactive - Wikipedia
A new player to the simulation of cities game came from Paradox Interactive. They had partial simulators in an earlier series called Cities In Motion. The beauty of Cities Skylines is it keeps track of every citizen and vehicle in the game. They actually move and do things so traffic jams and other problems occur much more naturally. The simulation is gaining in complexity.
John Conway's Game of Life
This was first mentioned in an article in Scientific American magazine in 1970. It is what is known as cellular automata and it simulates a form of simple life by following extremely simple rules. It results in some truly fascinating behavior. We could do this with 1970 era computers. This too has expanded a great deal.
Article: Mathematical Games - Scientific American
The Sims
- by Maxis - Wikipedia
In the style of Sim City they decided to bring it down closer. What if you followed the lives of one household? What if the people in your house needed to eat, sleep, interact socially, have a job, pay bills, decorate their house, and do all the normal stuff people did?
Basically they said.... Let's make that. It has been incredibly popular and has gone through versions with each version being able to do more and more detailed simulations.
Source: ign.com
Minecraft
- by Mojang - Wikipedia
Minecraft's visuals can be unappealing to some as it went for a more simplistic look during a time when hyper realism and the more realistic a game could be, the more people wanted it. Yet Minecraft actually had some inspired technology in it. It was inspired by a game called Infiniminer in terms of the initial look and functionality of the blocks in the game.
Yet where it truly shines is that the world appears to be infinite. It is not really, but I'll touch upon that later as that could be a key to finding out if WE are in a simulation.
You run in a direction and using a lot of math functions (Perlin, Simplex, and other noise functions) it generates terrain, biomes, etc. If you run a direction the game creates the world as you need it created. Until you went there, it did not truly exist. It was proceduraly created from math as needed.
The technique it uses to render the world is known as voxels (Volumetric Pixels). Voxels can be far more complex than cubes, but for Minecraft cubes it is. It has brilliant game play. It is also one of the most successful games of all time.
Source: Mojang.com
Games with Hyper Realism
With the birth of First Person Games (Thank You Id Software) games began trying to convey what the game world would look like from your eyes. As the computers and video card technology advanced this realism would get more and more life like. This again was largely thanks to brilliant math going on inside of CPUs and GPUs that could perform more and more mathematical operations in a shorter period of time.
Source: 3drealms.com
Source:gametransfers.com
Source: philipbuuck.com
Source: www.kotaku.com.au
Source: www.desura.com
Source: www.youtube.com
Source: www.gameshackstudios.com
Source: www.callofduty.com
You get the idea. There are so many of these that look super realistic these days. None of the ones above are the pinnacle of what we can achieve today. They do illustrate I believe the speed at which our simulations are achieving more and more detail and realism.
Other Games
There are other games that do interesting things worth noting. I cannot list all of them here. Things that were based around the idea of evolution, but not executed nearly with the detail people were hoping such as SPORE.
Source: spore.en.softonic.com
Or the recently released No Man's Sky which has a fully procedural universe with procedural plants, life forms, ships, planets, solar systems, etc. They all use voxels as Minecraft did yet they are beyond simple cubes.
Source: www.digitalspy.com
The Magic of Math and What it hints at
For centuries mathematicians have marveled that many things discovered in mathematics are active within the world of nature around us. These are things like the Golden Ratio (sometimes called the Golden Mean), the Fibonacci sequence, and fractals.
A lot of our own simulations use these things. They also use noise functions such as the Perlin, and Simplex noise functions.
The Golden Ratio / Fibbonacci Sequence
Source: www.livescience.com
Source: www.goldennumber.net
Source: katandcatquilts.blogspot.com
Source: www.emaze.com
Fractals
Source: wallpapersafari.com
Source: a2ua.com
Source: www.mnn.com
Source: Old mandelbrot zooming video I made... the zooming will be important in a minute
Noise Functions
Noise functions are mathematical functions that when you put variables into them they put out a value that can seem random, but it is not. These functions are how you make realistic looking terrain. With only a few numbers you can generate incredibly complex scenery. You literally could make a world simply by knowing a SEED VALUE, the x,y,z coordinates and the size of the world to generate.
These are really valuable. For you to see the exact same world as me you simply need to use the same SEED VALUE. So they appear random when you look at them, but they are not. If you plug in the same values then the exact same noise is generated.
Source: stackoverflow.com
Source: stackoverflow.com
How might we find out if this is a simulation?
Obviously if we were in a simulation it would likely be very difficult to find out. Or would it? I once thought if it was a simulation we could never find out. Yet our own simulations show us possible flaws and things that if you know where to look they are there.
This all revolves around mathematics. Mathematics is at the core of all simulations just like it is the language we use to describe our science.
If we are in a simulation then we must be inside of some machine or device running this simulation. We should not assume this device is in binary (0s and 1s) but for purposes of this article that is how I am going to approach it.
Source: thspitz.wordpress.com
Our computers use what is called a floating point number. To the average person that is the same as a decimal number, or a real number. They have positive and negative values and a decimal point SOMEWHERE.
That somewhere is where the term FLOATING comes from. A computer stores numbers in bytes or words. A byte is 8 bits (8 switches that can be 0 or 1). A word is usually 16 bits, but not always. So if a floating point number was built out of 16 bits how many numbers could you represent in that. Well you need one bit to tell whether it is positive or negative, and that leaves 15 bits, yet you must also indicate where the decimal point should be. So how big a number could be represented depended on the number of bits.
This is one of the reasons they made a big deal about 16 bit, 32 bit, and 64 bit CPUs in computers. That represented the amount of bits the computer could natively work with at a time in some form of instruction. This meant they could represent more and more detailed numbers.
Why is this important?
Those numbers do not represent infinity. They are limited by the detail they can go to by the limits of the floating point.
In a mandelbrot zoom program like the one I made above I did not stop at that zoom point because I wanted to. I stopped there because beyond that point the floating point needed was beyond the native support for the computer so, it starts to get blocky as it loses the ability to show detail.
In games like Minecraft if you were to run for a very long time in one direction you will reach places where the terrain would start getting blockier and blockier as it lost the precision of the math.
We can use this....
If we want to know whether we are in a simulation or not I believe it is likely the answers we seek would be in our pursuit of infinity. In fact we may already have seen some of this.
Source: www.bbc.co.uk
We basically have two ways to look Outward (Macroscopic), or Inward (Microscopic). The Macroscopic part of looking out into space proves more and more challenging. The microscopic we have had more and more luck with.
Looking inward could be viewed much like zooming in on a mandelbrot set. If we were in a simulation we should either reach a point where strange things start happening or some kind of loop to give the illusion of infinity.
Source: www.strangenotions.com
Perhaps we have already begun to see this.
Quantum Mechanics and a lot of the particles we have discovered at the quantum level certainly do behave much more oddly than anything we had encountered before them.
The fact that the quantum particles and their states seem to respond to the OBSERVER (aka Us) is kind of interesting. Much like when we observe something in one of our own simulations and our simulation jumps to the task of generating something.
So if we wish to know if we are in a simulation or not. I believe the direction to search would be to see how far towards inward or outward infinity you can go.
Source: www.pintrest.com
This was a long post, if you made it this far I hope you found it enjoyable and/or informative.