[HN Gopher] Four billion years in four minutes - Simulating worl...
___________________________________________________________________
Four billion years in four minutes - Simulating worlds on the GPU
Author : diggan
Score : 292 points
Date : 2024-07-29 23:33 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (davidar.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (davidar.io)
| shanxS wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder what it'd be like to live in simulated
| universe.
| dylan604 wrote:
| You say that as if you aren't. What proof do you have either
| way?
| TheHumanist wrote:
| Pretty sure all of you are in my simulation... Right? Or
| maybe I'm just in a coma and this is a coma dream...
| senectus1 wrote:
| why does it matter?
|
| If we are, we're in a sandbox that cant be escaped. live your
| best life and get on with it
|
| If we aren't Live your best life and get on with it.
|
| I've never seen the point of the question.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sometimes people like to exercise their brains with random
| what-ifs. I've never seen the point of people that never
| let their brain wander.
| andersa wrote:
| What if we _could_ escape the sandbox? Our software has
| crappy exploits all the time, why wouldn 't theirs?
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| "I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility"
| https://qntm.org/responsibility
| bilekas wrote:
| When thinking about this one, I always wonder if it even
| matters.. playing both "Yes" and "No" scenarios doesn't really
| offer any insight for me. Maybe it's a degree of nihilism but
| it makes me not get overwhelmed.
| cout wrote:
| A simulation has a nonzero chance of having exploits, and
| it's debatable whether it is in our best interest to discover
| them.
| heyitsguay wrote:
| What's an "exploit"? Is electricity an exploit of that
| weird phenomenon where a balloon sticks to a wall
| sometimes?
| koudelka wrote:
| I'd imagine that's an application of a rule, whereas an
| exploit is a violation of a rule that allows for (a &&
| !a) or some such inconsistency.
| brunokim wrote:
| God created electromagnetism as a way to transmit power
| between the fusion plant and its simulated planet, and is
| now delighted that we also use it to trade Pokemons back
| and forth.
| bilekas wrote:
| I consider biting my tongue when eating a glitch in the
| matrix. If there's a higher level exploit, I definitely
| don't wanna know!
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Consciousness is the exploit.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Watch the show Pantheon sometime! No spoilers, just highly
| relevant.
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| That series blew me away, both seasons, every episode is just
| totally awesome. Hard to reccomend without spoiling.
| ffhhj wrote:
| The Universe tries its best to catch up with Math. So, Math
| isn't fully simulable by the real?
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| What's it even like to live in a non-simulated one!
| dheera wrote:
| The energy and matter in the universe is actually a big analog
| quantum computer simulating the result of a set of equations.
|
| Nobody said the simulation had to be run on semiconductors.
| thfuran wrote:
| It's less commonly said, but the territory isn't the map
| either.
| xwolfi wrote:
| Well you are in a way, what is a simulation ? It's just a set
| of rules you follow that are simpler than the more complex
| environment that it runs in: I suppose if we could "see"
| "outside" the "universe", we'd understand that maybe our
| reality is very simple and limited compared to the "reality"
| outside. Maybe this would be true infinitely, or maybe the
| outside reality would be much more logical than ours, and we'd
| accept it's finite.
|
| But since we have a beginning, and a flow of time, we probably
| also have a birth, a mother, and maybe even a purpose... but
| that's a very human way to think, might all just be random
| soup.
|
| But imagine there's a self-aware agent in a simulation we
| create, he starts thinking the same thoughts, everyone mock him
| "we're all just random, there is no God, no design, how could
| so much energy be spent on such a useless giant block of empty
| space for any reason", he would have to sort of agree, but he
| would be sort of wrong. And discovering us, would bring him no
| solace: we can't tell him of our own designers ourselves.
| Discovering them, would bring us no solace either, for the same
| reason. That's why the concept of God is stupid: God has a God
| too, so what do we do now, solved no problem to accept His
| existence.
| mistermann wrote:
| I think modern people have so much faith in this reality,
| they'd have little chance accepting that it is other than it
| seems. Any evidence would have to be _stark_.
| melagonster wrote:
| Actually, physics supports the probability that we live in
| a simulation. Our universe has the highest limitation of
| speed and the smallest units of length and energy.
| mistermann wrote:
| Neuroscience, psychology, public opinion polls, and
| internet forums _demonstrate_ that we do.
|
| The problem is, the nature of this _style of_ simulation,
| as opposed to the Bostrom theory ( "the" simulation
| theory (singular, _there can be only one_ )), makes it
| (nearly) impossible to realize.
|
| This is both tragic and hilarious, especially since we
| have extensive knowledge of this flaw.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| That concept of God is stupid, some are tautological, and
| some are experiential. Eg the concept of God is love (if you
| have faith in the concept and reality of love being real).
| nurettin wrote:
| It would probably slow down or cause elevated heat between two
| mirrors.
| WithinReason wrote:
| It would be exactly like this one
| disillusioned wrote:
| Only tangentially related, but the lovely (quite) short story "I
| don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility" is
| fantastic and kind of hits on simulating worlds, in a sense:
|
| https://qntm.org/responsibility
| golergka wrote:
| I just love how a world-class quantum computer scientist who
| just made a discovery that just blows up everything known to
| mankind is up to the very end is worried about missing a bus.
| gavmor wrote:
| To deepen this tangent, I'll recommend Philip K. Dick's _The
| Trouble With Bubbles_ which imagines 60s cocktail party guests
| showing off their miniature planet-scale terrariums.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| Amazing, thank you for introducing me to this!
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm not sure I really know how to handle this. Do I just read
| the latest version linked at the top of the page? Or is the one
| offered by this like somehow more canonical or something? I'm
| not sure I've ever been faced with different versions of a
| fiction before. Just textbooks.
|
| I really love thought pieces like this if you refrain from
| poking holes in the logic or physics. I love the idea of a
| multiverse where they're all actually just identical so it's
| mostly moot.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Canon is just a construct invented to sell merchandise and
| keep out competitors. Enjoy whichever version of the story
| you'd like!
| Bluestein wrote:
| Enjoy all. Several, in fact :)
| scbrg wrote:
| > I'm not sure I've ever been faced with different versions
| of a fiction before.
|
| You probably have, but haven't thought of it like that. Ever
| seen a _Director 's Cut_ version of a movie? :-)
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Oh gosh it's true. And that whole Star Wars thing.
|
| I guess I've just not yet faced it with print.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > I guess I've just not yet faced it with print.
|
| Sure you have, if you've ever bought an Nth edition of a
| book (where N > 1). Editions aren't always just an
| artwork/formatting change, they sometimes contain changes
| to the text too.
| Andrews54757 wrote:
| I read both. They are both great but I like the original
| better. The new edition is accessible but I think the
| original's prose is beautiful.
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| I'd love to read alternate endings to it.
|
| I've been thinking about writing a story with a very similar
| plot for a couple of years, but it had a big plot hole:
| computation overhead between the universes, and I hadn't
| thought about quantum computers as a way to solve it.
|
| The other main difference with the story that I had in mind is
| that the characters would write a story about it, which would
| be "my" story, and they'd find a way to make it so that the
| ending would tell the reader the universe depth they are in, by
| creating a variable whose value is incremented by 1 for each
| universe.
|
| For anyone reading this on HN, you're 8474771628371839 levels
| deep.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it had a big plot hole: computation overhead between the
| universes_
|
| Unless you're going hard sci-fi, you can do what this story
| did. Give them by fiat "infinite processing power and
| infinite storage capacity."
| LoganDark wrote:
| I think all of qntm's stories are hard sci-fi.
| Retric wrote:
| Infinite processing power, infinite storage, zero
| latency, etc is about as soft of a setting as it gets.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Is it? A new fundamental particle doesn't necessarily
| make it soft sci-fi. The story seems perfectly technical
| to me.
|
| Can't black holes already encode an infinite amount of
| information past the event horizon?
| Retric wrote:
| > Can't black holes already encode an infinite amount of
| information past the event horizon?
|
| No, current physics has a bunch of hard limits on
| information.
|
| > A new fundamental particle doesn't necessarily make it
| soft sci-fi
|
| Calling something a particle doesn't matter here. It's a
| fully formed computational device that happens to
| magically solve all problems.
|
| Consider, how do you encode and read information from
| such a particle. Qubit's are physical properties of
| something, such as spin. Is this particle supposed to
| have infinite properties which you can access with
| infinite precision? No, it's just a magic macguffin that
| does whatever the author wants.
| rcxdude wrote:
| They're pretty soft, I would say. Most of Fine Structure
| is basically just magic.
| LoganDark wrote:
| If you're going to accuse something of using magic, I'm
| surprised you didn't accuse Ra, which even has something
| called 'magic'. I've been reading Fine Structure this
| morning and it doesn't seem magical to me at all. It's
| about as magical as quantum physics would be, I guess.
|
| I suppose even Ra still obeys the speed of light, though.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > For anyone reading this on HN, you're 8474771628371839
| levels deep.
|
| "Do you know how big the average positive integer is?"
| Bluestein wrote:
| > 8474771628371839
|
| 888 412 1289018?
| LoganDark wrote:
| > 888 412 1289018
|
| 0118 999 881 999 119 7253?
| Bluestein wrote:
| > 0118 999 881 999 119 7253?
|
| ... 262144 4782969 100000000 2357947691 61917364224
| 1792160394037 56693912375296 1946195068359375 :)
| zxexz wrote:
| I remember watching a (wonderful) T.V. show[0] that came out
| within the last couple decades, and feeling like a certain
| scene was definitely a nod to this story. The drama, and
| physics (and resolution) was done differently, but it left me
| in a similarly, pleasantly pensive state. [0] I almost made the
| mistake of naming it, or the director - but caught myself,
| realizing the context of this comment alone could be a major
| "spoiler".
|
| Maybe I've encoded the name in this comment (honestly though, I
| tried, and it's late - maybe search engines are good enough for
| it these days :) )
| kennyadam wrote:
| What's the name of the show?
| zxexz wrote:
| U+200E before letters spelling out show in my comment. Just
| noting that while I would have enjoyed the show very much
| even if I had this "spoiler", it certainly would have lost
| some "magic".
| chii wrote:
| you could use a url shortener to hide the link to the
| show's wikipedia page. For those who don't mind spoilers,
| they can know what you're talking about.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| https://tinyurl.com/mrx6rfef
| fredoliveira wrote:
| That is, in fact, a great tv show.
| namanyayg wrote:
| I think they definitely got "inspired" from qntm's story, but
| the ending of that TV show was unwatchably bad.
| mbil wrote:
| Thanks! For anyone who liked that here's another [0] short
| story in the same vein.
|
| [0]: https://pastebin.com/raw/gA4aRc0T
| niccl wrote:
| does anybody know what the music accompanying the full video was?
| It seemed familiar but I couldn't place it. Maybe AI generated?
| pietervdvn wrote:
| It sounds an awful lot like "Maiden Voyage" (the instrumental
| version) by the clockwork dolls, but not quite.
| FrancoisBosun wrote:
| Sunshine (Adagio in D minor)
|
| https://open.spotify.com/intl-fr/track/50ExtKr8j9cHTY3OEw282...
|
| I asked Siri to identify the song.
| dheera wrote:
| Sounds more like "jackhammer in D minor" rather than an
| "adagio"
| FredPret wrote:
| Today, a simple simulation at 60fps.
|
| Tomorrow: "When you gaze long into the simulation, the simulation
| gazes back"
| swayvil wrote:
| >written entirely in GLSL fragment shaders
|
| What's the language for that?
|
| (The music is pretty cliche. Maybe it was written by AI)
| daemonologist wrote:
| The music is "Adagio in D Minor", and probably cliche more
| because it's been used so much rather than because it was
| cliche when written. It was originally composed by John Murphy
| for the 2007 film _Sunshine_.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine:_Music_from_the_Motio...
| snitch182 wrote:
| Sunshine is one really fine piece of film. Beautiful.
| ascar wrote:
| Not sure if that's actually your question, but GLSL is the
| language
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL_Shading_Language
| niederman wrote:
| GLSL is the language.
| ahmadmk wrote:
| There is an excellent hard science fiction book called
| permutation city that very related to this topic...it made me
| feel like i was in a dream when i read this post's title
| redbluething wrote:
| I finished that book yesterday. I had exactly the same
| reaction.
| netcraft wrote:
| I havent yet read permutation city but Diaspora is one of my
| favorite sci-fi novels. I need to make time for it
| xwolfi wrote:
| Diaspora gives me shivers just thinking about it. Permutation
| City is fun, but not as inspiring as Diaspora.
| Bluestein wrote:
| He - rightly, and often - makes these rounds here when
| simulacrums are at hand. Well deserved.-
| exe34 wrote:
| there's a short story in his anthology that is a sequel to
| diaspora. oceanic.
| netcraft wrote:
| I had no idea it was related to diaspora. After reading
| only the first few paragraphs I can't wait to read it all.
| Thank you!
| exe34 wrote:
| tbh a number of the other short stories could be
| considered prequels to diaspora.
| catoc wrote:
| Permutation City is briljant - Greg Egan has many (free)
| stories exploring physics on his website:
| https://www.gregegan.net/
| BelleOfTheBall wrote:
| Egan is one of those rare writers where reading his book made
| me realize just how much smarter he is than me. Not even in a
| negative way, it's simply like listening to a lecture by a
| brilliant, brilliant man.
| o11c wrote:
| Not sure why, but all the shadertoy examples embedded in the page
| play at like 0.6 FPS for me. When I open the linked "final
| shader" on the shadertoy website I get 60fps just fine ...
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| If your browser is like mine, there is a clipped play button
| below the rewind button that resolves the issue.
| o11c wrote:
| Ah, that indeed works.
|
| Taking a look, the CSS throws warnings about being ignored;
| adding "position: absolute" fixes that and makes the button
| fully visible.
| reason-mr wrote:
| In truth, it must be said that some details were omitted by the
| simulation :)
| kmoser wrote:
| Back in 1996/1997 I worked on a CD-ROM game that simulated
| movement of the tectonic plates, as well as temperature,
| elevation, and precipitation, over millions of years. Amazing to
| see how evolution (heh!) of computing hardware and software have
| come so far in 28 years: https://www.kmoser.com/evolution/
| fersaysrelax wrote:
| I think you are the first person I come across that knows that
| game and you were an actual dev on it! So thank you! I played
| it when I was around 13(I think) and I loved it. The whole
| concept of simulating a planet and the animals on it was pretty
| much mind blowing for me at the time(it still is). I should
| have kept the poster that came with it...the different sapien
| evolutionary branches were really interesting.
| kmoser wrote:
| Cool! It's admittedly an obscure game. My main contribution
| included the random generation and movement of the cratons.
| This involved mapping Cartesian to spherical coordinates but
| harder because each row of tiles was offset by half a tile's
| width from the rows above and below, like a brick wall.
|
| We wrote an in-house editor that let us create and animate
| the different cratons, starting with the Pangaea
| configuration (basically all cratons stuck together as a
| giant continent) all the way through to how they are arranged
| now, to simulate how they moved historically. That was also
| difficult!
|
| I also worked on the initial placement of some visual
| elements that dotted the landscape, and the serialization of
| the different data structures for loading/saving games.
|
| After it shipped they gave each of us devs a couple of
| shrink-wrapped copies of the boxed final product but weirdly
| they were not the US version. I still have an (unopened)
| Portuguese version that probably has the poster.
| harha wrote:
| One of my favorite courses at university was energy policy
| analysis, where we played around with the EPPA model (developed
| at MIT) [0]. We made changes to certain parameters to see how
| things might work out, e.g. if cost of energy storage is reduced
| 10x.
|
| Lots of fun, but I unfortunately never managed to find anything
| similar to do in my job.
|
| [0]: https://globalchange.mit.edu/research/research-tools/eppa
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| Why only fragment shaders? If you had vertex shaders for a
| heightmap too then you could zoom down to the surface.
| noduerme wrote:
| Mm..cool but the last part where any civilization that has night
| lights would by definition burn all the fossil fuels and turn the
| place into a desert seems like an assumption based on only one
| possible trajectory of our own civilization, let alone all other
| possible alien civilizations. There's nothing to make death by
| warming and desertification any likelier than nuclear war or the
| development of clean fusion, or a plague or an invasion from
| another nearby procedurally generated earth-like planet.
|
| Basically it's a cool sim when it's trying to simulate stuff that
| actually happened, and before it gets opinionated.
|
| Moreover, it apparently equates heat with dryness, and also
| doesn't take into account the effect of additional CO2 on plant
| life. It _is_ called a greenhouse effect for a reason. It 's
| quite possible the equatorial belt could heat up to where it's
| uninhabitable by humans but overrun by jungle rather than desert.
| baxtr wrote:
| While I have some doubts some of your statements your comment
| still resonates.
|
| Unfortunately, we live in an "Excel world". The predominant
| thinking is that our highly complex world can be modeled into
| an excel sheet. And based on the outputs we should make
| decisions.
|
| This approach _mostly_ ignores the second order effects you
| describe.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| Climate change predicts a warmer wetter world The author just
| didn't know this
| Qem wrote:
| The issue is, the locations where most humans live today,
| grew historically from the best spots our ancestors could
| find in the whole planet, taking many factors in
| consideration: proximity to water bodies, good climate,
| good agricultural lands, adequate rainfall, et cetera.
| These are not random locations, they grew around the best
| spots available. If climate changes, they tend to regress
| toward the mean, diminishing carrying capacity. Other
| places may even improve, from the POV of human
| habitability, but statistically those will not be the same
| we have a lot of people living today, but places like
| siberia, that historically were population voids, prompting
| the need for mass migration and mass resettlement in a
| world that is already full of borders, and all the
| associated problems this entails.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Worlds within worlds
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-07-30 23:02 UTC)