I was twiddling the simulation hypothesis, and it raised questions I wanted to explore. The following is entirely for fun and by no means conclusive.
A few days ago, I was thinking of Cantor’s Diagonal Argument (a proof of different sizes of infinity) and connected it to Shannon’s Information Theory (in particular about encoding information and efficient storage), and the Simulation Hypothesis (that our world is a simulation).
The question that came to mind is: What are the limits for simulations?
I find the question interesting having worked on games, trying to create real-time experiences for players, and the scope and challenges we face. There are constraints on building the assets for games, rendering the environment, audio, streaming data since it can’t be in memory all the time, computing the next frame from the previous, etc.
Simulations are bounded by what substrate (what is doing the simulation) is capable of processing. For example, if we are in a simulation, and our substrate is finite, we are necessarily finite.
This is where real numbers come to mind. If space is continuous instead of discrete, then encoding could require infinite storage to store position. If time is continuous, computing change is similarly non-trivial. An alternative is relying on a proxy representation of the simulating substrate itself (in which case that could be reflected in the simulation).
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