The Computational Requirements for the Matrix 953
goombah99 writes "Nick Bostrom discusses the computational requirements needed to simulate human existence. He offers a proof based on the anthropic principle, that you are almost certainly a computer simulation and not "real". The idea is that given that humans don't go extinct in geologically short time then eventually computer capability will allow complete simulation of the human cortex. Consequently, there must be far more simulations running in future millennia than seconds since you were born. Thus its astronomically more likely you are a simulation than real ... if humans don't go extinct shortly. Recalling the 13th floor, Robin Hanson discusses how one should try to live in a simulation. David Wolpert also weighs in on the physical limits of Turing machines for simulation of the universe. This also may explain why time travel seems impossible: we dont meet visitors from the future since only the present is being simulated."
Episode of Star Trek (Score:5, Interesting)
At the end, Barkley wonders if he himself is part of a simulation and says "Computer, end program".
Ok, that's it. I'm a Nerd.
What if (Score:4, Interesting)
For example, if a charecter being simulated in a 13th floor styled simulation, did not understand the concept of wireframes (when he reaches the "edge" of the simulated world), would he consider it abnormal?
Similarly, in our "real world", space - the outer void - the vaccum - can be a means of conserving memory by being empty space, so that the "system" is able to process high detailed simulations on planets.... maybe only one planet has life (simulated) because the "system" is only capable of processing the complex simulations of one such biosphere
All i'm trying to say is that it's possible to come up with innumerable theories.. its exciting, it stimulates are brains, but HOW SERIOUSLY are we supposed to take them?
why ohh why.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Odd. (Score:3, Interesting)
IOW, branch prediction in the Great Itanium in the sky isn't working too well, is it?
Here's anoher one for your Saturday Night "Isn't that fucked up?" discussions: I've always wondered if time actually is linear. We and our physics are stuck in the current space/time continuum, and therefore we would have no idea if time actually followed say, a sine wave, since we would have no other point of reference.
Whoa.
Soko
Re:Much like religion (Score:2, Interesting)
Food for thought...
Re:What the......? (Score:3, Interesting)
What I find interesting is that people actually get *paid* to indulge in this masturbatory nonsense. Talk about an amazing con....
Max
Re:I don't know... (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, let's assume time travel is possible. We can go both ways in the fourth dimension. This basically removes any sort of chronological constraints from our actions. In other words, ordinarily, if I want to drive a car, I first have to obtain it. But in this universe, if I want a time machine, I can go back in time and teach myself how to make a time machine so I can go back in time to teach myself how to make the time machine. You get the idea.
So if I decide I want a time machine right now, why can't I just teach myself how to make one so that I can go back in time to teach myself how to make one? Yeah. That's what I thought.
Re:why ohh why.. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is always what got me about The Matrix. There is even a comment somewhere along in the first movie about how the living are fed the waste of the dead. Well, great, but what about conservation of energy? Where is this energy actually coming from? In our normal ecosystem, it comes from the sun via photosynthesis. Here, no sun, no plants, people eating people...sounds like perpetual motion.
And even if we do accept that animals can somehow power these machines, why don't they just use pigs or cows or something? Or give lobotomies on birth? Eh?
But as you said, quit thinking about it all seriously, and just enjoy the movie. It's a vehicle, and not every aspect should be taken at face value or should be expected to make perfect sense.
Not really (Score:3, Interesting)
First, we won't ever have the computing power to simulate a universe. That's simple to find out: If you want to simulate something completely, Your computer hase to be bigger than what you want to simulate. Because somewhere you have to store all the information, and you'll need exactly as much quantums to store the information about them as you simulate. Conclusion: we won't be able to even simulate the earth.
For sure, that doesn't yet prove we aren't a simulation. One can't prove or disprove anything about that, and that's why this isn't science.
There could of course be a universe with enough storage and computing power to simulate our universe (and that could again be a simulation etc). If you know something about quantum physics maybe you can imagine what computing power is necessary - for each single quantum, you need to compute the forces to each other, and some probabilities, too. We're far from even simulating very little amounts of matter today.
But saying it would be more probable we're being simulated is like giving probabilities for the existence of a god - ie one can't say anything about it. It's outside of what one can give something like probabilities for.
The only thing we could look for was if we find evidence for that our universe is simulated with computers similar to the ones we're using today, ie we could search for typical errors or something like rounding...
Re:Can the Matrix simulate independent thought? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wasn't that the premise of the original matrix (the one built prior to the trilogy)? It was a paradise, but the problem was that no one believed it and so massive amounts of people would wake from it. Hence the reason why the second matrix was built (going back to Agent Smith's description in the first movie).
I always thought the matrix was more a playground for individual minds to play in. If you set up an environment that is engineered to look like our world, place the minds in the system with some initial parameters (e.g. you are a programmer looking for work and like potato chips and coffee, etc) and then let those objects loose in the system, things should flow fairly smoothly. The matrix was more like a drug to keep the minds of their batteries happy basically, and the reason they chose this section of our history is that it was "the height of our civilization". But even Neo has a choice by the architect in the second movie.
I would say that control came by limiting choices. This comes from the societal structure that is put in place, something which most people are more than happy to live within. The few that refused to accept that were shown a different reality (i.e. unplugged from the matrix). However, the one wrench that Matrix:Reloaded tossed into the mix was Neo's ability to sense the machines on the other side. This would indicate that the true architects of the matrix built a buffer zone in which those minds that didn't believe the first matrix would wake up into the second thus saving them as a power source for a while longer and ensuring that every once and awhile you could flush those who would attempt to destroy your creation. By controlling the resistance you have complete control as Orwell showed us in 1984.
Re:why ohh why.. (Score:2, Interesting)
From the point where the first guy who could manipulate the Matrix freely showed up, they should have been giving frontal lobotomies to all the new fuel cells.
Or the robots could have "fled" to space, leaving behind the humans who just ruined their own ecosystem...
Of course, the AIs aren't completely logical and unemotional... Smith never would have snapped in the first movie otherwise... one of the by-products of true intelligence.
Kierthos
Re:screw it. (Score:5, Interesting)
This text roughtly assumes that the simulator is basically an american guy and the main reason for simulating a universe is to go to a party. Very deep philosophy. The simulator might well be a zen poet two centuries in the future interested in the pattern of human emotions, or some alien student trying to build the most absurd form of life. There is simply no way to know. So trying to please this simulator is completely absurd.
The talk about seeing the weaknesses in the simulation because certain parts are not simulated also takes the wrong perspective. Assuming you build a simulation that is not homogenous, you will make sure that the where there are simplifications they will have little influence (i.e they are not noticable). As for the hypothesis that certain people are not true, I don't like when people start talking about true/chosen/über/whatever people.
This is just some guy projecting his own bias on some theoretical entity and using this to justify his own (egoistic I might add) approach to live as being "logical". I agree that this is not what american society needs, but I fear it is what it wants. Of course, this has been the stuff of religions for centuries, replace simulator by god and voilà!
Re:why ohh why.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:1, Interesting)
As you look into parallel mirrors, you can never see the infinity because your head is in the way. In other words, there is no accurate simulation of reality.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Interesting)
it would be mind-numbing to write (much less RUN) a program that would fully emulate every atom in the world at all times. all you have to do (ask anyone in movies) is emulate the minumum amount to look realistic on screen. if someone needs to look closer, emulate what they're examining properly, only while they are examining it. Otherwise you can very easily emulate a white box with bumpmaps, rather than the wood, the drywall, the paint, the electricity, and everything else that makes a wall. until someone examines the wall, you can get away with just a white box with paint-like bumpmapping.
Re:screw it. (Score:1, Interesting)
hypothesise all you want, it doesn't change the fact that A is A and you have to go to work on monday.
Nobody said it did.
Everybody must have some sort of delusional idea of what reality is -- whether there's a god, a heaven, a hell, a cadre of alien souls in locked into our brains by Xenu, whether we're in a computer simulation, whether everyone else on earth is a robot built to entertain us, whether dragons really exist, whether it's ok to hate certain people, whether it's ok to ignore other people's problems, and so on in endless variety.
This is all necessary to prevent us from going completely insane over the fact that we're just very smart monkeys, who will eventually die and rot, and that there are more of us on the planet than we can possibly feed, and that as long as we are what we are, these will never change.
You sound as though you believe that such theorizing is a waste of our time and saps energy away from real work on tangible problems, whereas I sincerely dobut that people could ever manage to develop the civilization that we have without having some delusion about what reality is. If everybody knew that there are some problems that can never be solved, why would anyone do anything? Mankind is eternally striving for perfection, blinding itself to the fact that it can never reach it.
And thus enter the transhumanists, who neatly avoid the issue with the delusion that mankind will ultimately (maybe even very soon) trancend it's bodily form and become something that never dies, needs no food, and is millions of times more intellegent. Perfection, at last!
Er...no. No matter what form intellegent life takes, there will always be some resource for which demand is greater than supply. And it will fight over it, be it by claw or spear or gun or nuke or laser or by some means we can't imagine yet. Few will dominate many, as they always have, and yet...they will still all hold onto the delusion that all is right with the universe.
So, what I'm saying, roughly, is that philosophy is the fine art of facing the horrible truth of reality, but sideways, so as to concoct better delusions.
Relativity (Score:2, Interesting)
You're trying to use humanly words and concepts to to explain something beyond your reach.
Words like "simulation", "processing power", "time", "think" and "entertain" are out of question here, you're acting like the "Sims" trying to think while they only get things the binary way, they don't even understand what a touch or smell is let alone the words themselves.
So it's the same here, you're trying to attribute humanly concepts upon God who's the maker of these concepts.
For example you cannot attribute time to God because he's out of time, he's looking at it in a somehow similar way you look at your code.
Re: In the "What Is The Point" category... (Score:2, Interesting)
DarwinBots is a kinda cool alife demonstration, and it stores every "lifeform" as a program that runs in paralell with the other "organisms".
And about the idea of putting a terminator in Colloseum in greece, whows that some people really should learn a little bit more about ancient history. Perhaps a simulation of ancioent rome would be better
In quantum theory there is a "rule" saying that things don't change until you study the object.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2, Interesting)
I dont think that it would be all that mind numbing to simulate every atom. In fact, we have a process to do such a similar thing, and have been doing that for at least 45 years. It's called cellular automation. We use it to model fluid dynamics among other things. THe rules tend to be rather simple, and easy to compute, the results totally unpredictable. If we are a simulation, then chances are that were just a massive cellular automation running on a massive alien computer. Chances are that they dont even know we exist. CHances are that we will build a massive cellular automation to model our own world, in an attempt to better understand our environment, in the process it's possible that we could create virtual intelligent beings, and be totally unaware they even exist.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Interesting)
Here you assume that the system running the simulation exists in a world much like the one we experience. It's pretty easy for us to simulate a simple 2D world, for all we know, this is some dumbed-down simulation with 'only' 3 dimensions.
Re:why ohh why Does the Matrix need People? (Score:5, Interesting)
By understanding the Message of The Matrix, you will come to understand many of the logical inconsistencies in the film. Everything in that movie got put there for a reason and the W bros felt no shame altering some of the content so more people would understand the Message. So while it may ire geeks, it makes the movie easier to swallow for people new to these sorts of ideas. I personally just pretend that Morphius said, "Humans can perform up to 10^5 Teraflops (or whatever) of complex operations that the robots steal to add to their available processing power." I think you can see how this would require a much longer dialog between Neo and Morphius to inform the average viewer of what that means.
What do you think?
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Crulx
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:4, Interesting)
On the Summer Reading List thread, many slashdotters mentioned The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Within Ch. 6 was a description of how Prime Intellect "rewrote" the Universe, as follows:
So basically, the visual portion of this world would just be like a raytracer running constantly. Whatever the eye can see it simulates and draws; out of the eye, nothing is (and need to be) simulated.
You don't even need a Matrix for simulation... (Score:5, Interesting)
Most people don't realize that the brain gives them a description of the outside world, not a picture of it. Try drawing a still life. What? Too difficult? Why? If you actually saw the world as it is, it wouldn't be too difficult, the only problem would be making the brush strokes. But instead, you need knowledge of the technique of perspective, you need knowledge of shading, etc. Why do we need knowledge to draw a world we're seeing with out own eyes?
Furthermore, what our brain presents is not the whole truth, even if it is a partial truth, which this article presents an article against. We see three dimensions of a world that could have many more, according to some theories. Some people only see two dimensions of this world. Some people don't see any dimensions of this world. Why do we assume that other important things, like specifics about the very way things are, are not modified by are brain? They are, at least indirectly, by our evolved emotions, but we assume that there's no modification at the sensory level. When it seems so easy to introduce noticeable differences at the sensory level by hallucinogens, why can't we believe the brain is already doing it to an extent?
God playing SimCity? (Score:5, Interesting)
Quantum Mechanics could be simulation artifact. (Score:5, Interesting)
Godel's theorem in a nut shell: you cant prove inconsistency in any set of axioms within the context of those axioms.
suppose for a moment that this is a simulation with a finite amount of memory to parameterize the "world". the state of this system is propgated from time slice to time slice by some set of finite difference equations. well this means that everything is perfectly self-consistent. if you devise any experiment within the simulation itself to measure any observable then you will discover it is self consistent. The laws of nature a person living there would formulate would in fact be the correct ones for that system. you would never be able to discover an inconsistency.
consider for example QM. basically in a quantum world there ARE limits on resolution. indeed the limits are surprisingly like how one creates a simulation. for example, in any practical 3-D game the voxels of distant objects have larger volumes than the close by ones that you can see more clearly. likewise fast moving objects in the background are less precisely placed from frame to frame while maintaining on average an accurate speed.
its as though someone gridded the game in such a way as to have hyper cubes of constant delta-P time delta-X. hey wadda ya know that's the heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Indeed its easier to simulate a trajectory if you dont have to do it exactly. simply compute the approximate result with error bars and then any time the result is closely inspected you return a different sample from the approximate distribution. Thus one does not have to memo-ize everthing the game player has looked at carefully, you can recreate it on the fly each time something is inspected at high resolution simply by drawing an approximate sample from the distribution. The fact that two looks never quite agree is written off as the "hiesenberg uncertainty principle", or to the QM notion that inspecting an object can change its state.
Another hiesenberg principle is the energy-time uncertaintly (to measure the energy of something precisely takes increasing amounts of time). Again this is in keeping with a simulation. to compute the simulation to increacing levels of precision will take more time.
and remember folks the simulation does not have to run in real time!
Finally to digress a bit. Just suppose for moment the supposition that this is simulation is true. then might it might also be possible that the people doing the simulation are also simulations. and so on ad infinitum. the interesting thing is that at each layer of this onion it seems to me that the plausibility that you live in a simulation increases. this is because with each subsequent layer the plausibility of sufficient computer power prior to extinction improves.
My hero *swoon* (Score:2, Interesting)
In any case, I'd still like to tack a few things onto that.
A large portion of our observation of very small things has involved the flinging of other very small things towards them. It follows then that we'd be compounding the imprecision of "drawing an approximate sample from the distribution" of the thing we are inspecting with the imprecision of the approximation of the thing we are flinging.In a different sense, it's almost amusing to think that QM may be the result of us having reached the limit of precision of ReallyReallyReallyLongDouble in the system in which we exist, or that maybe somewhere out there at very fundamental level exists a Math.floor().
Back to Godel though:
Similarly, any simulation we might create in the future must be "less powerful", in that its mechanics of operation (and existence!) can be fully explained within the operating rules of our simulation. This could continue on in both directions. I wonder where we'd be in the ladder of complexity? Would we really be losing "resolution" as our simulations created their own simulations? If we look back to our simulators, then do we assume that all inexplicable phenomena of our existence can be fully justified in their context? If they don't exist, then does that mean that these phenomena are really explainable or not?1) For fun and fluff - So there would be "formally undecidable truths" in our simulation/system. What do you think they might be? "God Exists". "Pepsi really does taste better".
2) Now I'm just going to go off on a semiconscious Sunday-morning rambling here, so don't take me seriously (but humor me if you're so inclined). So in order for everything in our system to be justifiable and explicable, we'd need a more powerful system, a higher level of simulation.
Re: drugs are bad (Score:2, Interesting)
From an existentialist (thus pessimistic) point of view, we simply exist. Attempts to explain otherwise, of how universe is controlled by a greater being, controlled by a fixed law, or in this case, simulated, is merely attempts of humans to create meaning that does not exist. We simply are, our reality simply is, no greater being, no fixed law.
I take this further and say that our reality may or may not just exist, but does not matter. Like the point of infinite Matrices, one simulated by the other, it simply does not matter where the "real reality" is. Within our concepts that are taken for granted anyway (anyone can define "define"? anyone can define "is"? Why does the reflexive law of equality have to be true?), there can many explanations of our reality. And those explanations can be true (whatever true means); but as long as this universe's workings does not change, the explanations are all valid and "true", it simply does not matter which one you believe in - our reality will keep on its ways, existing as it is.
Re:Computational Power Required (Score:4, Interesting)
The human brain is the most complex and powerful computer system in existence today. Granted it's not terrific at raw number crunching, but for pattern matching, association, memory storage, creativity, interaction. etc it's tops.
The machine's computers don't need to run simulations, they just need enough computing power to induce certain perceptions within each brain and to coordinate the functioning of all the brains that are near one another in the simulation. The knowledge to do this it taught/programmed in from birth. Your brain is completely capable of inventing people, having two way conversations with those invented people, and designing and re-designing physical locations on the fly. All without you conciously thinking about it.
Let me describe this more elaborately:
Assume you and I are living in a simulated world while having this conversation. The machines don't need to simulate my typing on the keyboard, or the text on my screen, or the air I'm breathing. My brain knows how to do that (it was tought to by the machines). You brain knows all those things also. There is no need for the main computers to simulate that for the both of us. The main computers simply assure that we can interact from within the same context of this computer system. There has so be some way for the messages to pass between us.
Of course, there's no reason to believe that's even the case. Perhaps you are simply a figment of my imagination, a simulation within my brain, and so is this computer system. Suppose that each and every brain plugged in to the system runs it's own complete simulation, just making things up as it goes along. There is no way to proove that another person actually exists, as anyone else you ask may also not exist, but instead be part of your simulation. As such they would be under your control and say whatever needed to be said. Think about the complexity of your dreams that you recall.
The role of the machines in this case is simply to regulate the simulations we run within our own brains, making sure that they don't become too extreem in the negative or positive sense. There is no need for the plugged in brains to ever communicate with each other.
Then again (and this is a guess), Neo never actually woke up from the Matrix, and the whole "real world" thing is simply another "simulation" introduced by the machines to get this anomoly out of the code. Perhaps Neo was dreaming the entire thing.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Interesting)
Your argument essentially boils down to the claim that we would be able to run our own simulation (either a computerized simulation or a pen-and-paper calculation), and compare the results of it to "reality." However, calculating the future state of a system necessarily relies upon determining the present state of the system. When we determine the present state to some degree of precision, we tell the simulation that it needs to pay more attention to those details.
Re:False anthropic principle applications (Score:2, Interesting)
Suppose you have four bags. One bag contains ten pennies, one a hundred pennies, one a thousand pennies, and one has ten nickles. (If you want the sensible version of this analogy, imagine that each bag has some number of pennies and some number of nickles, in interesting variations. I'm making it really simple.)
Suppose I pull a penny out of a bag, but you don't see which, and I say, which bag did I pull the penny out of, the ten-cent bag, the fifty-cent bag, the dollar bag, or the ten-dollar bag?
The only thing probability tells us conclusively is that I didn't get it out of the fifty-cent bag, which has only nickles.
Of the remaining bags, just because one of them has more pennies, that doesn't mean it's more likely I pulled a penny from that bag.
Now, you might think, well, but if instead of me picking a penny from a bag, that's a bad analogy, the better analogy to the anthropic principle is to talk about the point of view of the pennies. If we average across all pennies, we're more likely to see the point of view of a penny in the ten-dollar bag.
The real problem is this: only one of the four bag exists, and we have no way of knowing which one exists, and no basis for assigning any probabilities to them. Probabilities are best understood as the statistical properties of potential things, e.g. if the probability of a die rolling a 2 is 1/6, I'm saying, if I rolled the die a lot of times, the number of times would come up 2 would approach 1/6 of the attempts.
But we don't get to choose from multiple possible universes to accumulate statistics from them. That's meaningless. So you can't meaningfully assign probabilities to various alternate possible universes.
Let me make that explicit. I show you the penny, and I ask you which bag I took it out of. And you say, 1/3 probability the ten-cent bag, 1/3 probability the dollar bag, and 1/3 probability the ten-dollar bag, and 0 probability the fifty-cent bag.
Now, I reveal, that I made a conscious choice not to draw from the ten-cent bag, and I flipped a coin to decide between the other two. Does that make the probability 1/2 for the dollar and ten-dollar bags? Or is the truth just that I pulled it from the dollar back with probability 1, and from the others with probability 0, and there's really nothing more to be said?
Here's a similar thing to tangle with: suppose on Monday it rains, and on Tuesday it doesn't rain. The weatherman predicts a 70% chance of rain on Monday, and a 30% chance of rain on Tuesday. Was he right? What does that even mean? How would you go about measuring the accuracy of weather predictions? You could keep count, and find out for each percentage whether they actual number of times it rained matched that percentage. But, say over the course of the year it rains on average 1/5 of the time. A weatherman who predicts a 20% chance of rain every day will come out perfect, but be the most useless prediction.
Personally, I think the "matrix" agument has other more important flaws since you can pick a single fixed universe to make it work in. The substrate-independence argument seems a little weird when applied to a single machine computing 10M people's brains--it's not clear to me that anything approaching 10M independent experienceable consciousnesses would occur. But most importantly, I think outcome (2) is the most likely; people wouldn't be that interested in running such detailed simulations (of human brains sufficient to generate substrate-independent consciousness) for long periods of time; what's the point in simulating results you're never going to see?
In college I completed the requirements for an undergraduate philosophy degree, but this kind of angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin business is exactly why I decided to stop spending any time thinking about non-concrete crap.
simulation or VR (Score:3, Interesting)
If I was a compassionate future AI determined to do what I could for human beings despite their proclivity to destroy themselves and one another, I might well pop the lot of them into tailored VRs where they could live out their urges over and over again in a sort of VR mediated reincarnational system, until they were adequately housebroken. Then they might be let out onto the main datasphere.
But I find it far less likely that future descendants would be crass enough to run us as if we were real just for their own amusement without consideration of the ethics involved.