4.3 KiB
[RT] Hypercomputation, And Other Crimes @ Things Of Interest
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Author: u/None *
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URL:
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Score: 26
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Created: 2016-12-19T01:25:02
Post:
Comments:
u/Veedrac [+9] (an hour later)
The contrivance I saw was already mentioned in a comment.
This scenario is based on the assumption that all the simulations are identical and will continue to be so. But if all the YOUS will always be identical, reducing their number back to one will not change anything significant.
However, there's a more interesting aspect, at least to me. Hypercomputation allows running the universe infinitely fast.
Save the state of the universe. Spawn a hypercomputation of that saved state of the universe. Run that hypercomputation at ≫1x speed. You now have an infinite tower of universes, each running progressively faster than the depth below. This of course resembles a Zeno Machine, except the universe isn't Turing complete and can fail.
If the simulated universe is augmented with some kind of anti-entropy law (that only kicks in later, to avoid destabilizing the setup of the infinite chain), and probably some kind of Ko-like rule, this effectively beats entropy.
u/chaosmosis [+3] and with strange aeons, even death may die (3 hours later)
I agree that the hypercomputation aspect is a lot more interesting than the rest.
This might offer a good path to make warring time traveler stories more logically consistent. Normally, the trouble is that it's trivial for one person to wipe another person out of the universe unless both of them are in some kind of contrived limbo independent of intuitive time and its paradoxes. But if travelers are always coming from simulated universes, escaping upwards from layers further towards the bottom, this problem would be dealt with. It's also really interesting.
u/alexanderwales [+5] Time flies like an arrow (3 hours later)
Somewhat similar to this? (from the same author)
u/chaosmosis [+4] and with strange aeons, even death may die (3 hours later)
Not really, although that's a novel time travel scheme I've never seen before.
I was not imagining a form of time travel where, say, you can travel back into the past and kill Hitler, but something more dramatic, where, perhaps, futuristic robots from a future Earth unlike our own travel back to a point shortly after the first hypercomputer was built, and do battle with futuristic bioengineered humanoids from a future Earth unlike our own, etc. Every invention of a hypercomputer within a hypercomputer would become a battleground. And if you win one round, you are still vulnerable to invasion from underneath if someone in your universe builds a hypercomputer. The motivation for people to continue to build hypercomputers is to get information from the future that lets them deal with entropy. But this means the future is necessarily more capable than the present. But you could still try to heavily stack the deck. But the future would have full awareness of the ways in which you attempted to stack the deck. The motivation for groups underneath to try fighting the groups above would be value drift, I guess.
u/redrach [+3] (23 hours later)
If lower stacks are operating on a faster time rate, then moving up the stack could be a way to escape heat death.
u/Veedrac [+2] (16 hours later)
Thinking about this more, this isn't going to work as-is. If there's any point in the future (of the simulated universes) where the machine gets turned off permanently, then by necessity the same must be true for all universes below that. Thus, although the bottom-most universes are simulated infinitely fast, they're also infinitely brief.
Since you seem to be able to control the sub-universes' laws, this might be fixable (eg. by putting the simulated hypercomputer in some separate space to the rest of the simulated universe), but it's not clear if there's a solution simpler than that.
u/BlueSigil [+2] (7 days later)
Interesting, though if you acted off the information you gathered, the universes wouldn't stay in sync.