[Kizzi]

Lets say that our reality is really a simulation designed by scientists in the real reality. The question is, would the scientists be able to fast forward from year 0 to say 13 billion years later (2006ad), whilst for those in the simulation it would seem everything is running at normal rate?

(My guess is that the answer is yes but the 'computer(s)' that the simulation is running on would need the extra processing power to fast forward!)

KiZzI

[Kizzi]

If they couldn't fast forward but had to wait 13 billion years (or whatever), this would be a serious deterence to running such simulations.

KiZzI

[BluesMan]

Intriguing

I would hazard to guess that the scientist could fast forward, however as time may be relative to observer it would not be noticeable.

[TheBigDog]

This is assuming that the program is single threaded, and not asynchronous objects. In the later you would witness violations of physical laws. In the former you would not.

Bill

[alexander]

your assumption is crazy, as we cant anywhere accurately simulate a storm system, and you are talking about simulating the whole world? You have no idea what kind of processing power is required, let me put it to you in perspective, in order to simulate every atom, you could for example store it in memory, say it only takes up a byte, with all its data, no scratch that, make it more real, more possible, yet extremely minimalist, it takes up 10 bytes to store all the required info for any given atom, and trust me that is equivalent of storing 10 letters, you would use about 10^81 (assuming that there are only 10^80 atoms in the currently seen universe, and trust me that is such an underestimete...) bytes of data, or approximately 90949470101772928237915039150390625000000000000000 000000000000000000000 terabytes of memory do you have any idea as to how much that is? all of world's total memory technology ever made combined would not make up for a billionth of a percent of that, even considering books, in fact i bet that even if you took the storage capacity of brains and somehow derived a direct translation to the bit system, you would not be able to make up for 1% of the storage needed, and i am talking about a cumulative count of space in every brain that has ever existed with exaggeration of the total amounts of dinasaurs and what even taking in consideration species and races that might not have ever existed, i still doubt that you'd break 1%.... aside from that, just imagine the power needed to run the simulation, it is virtually impossible as of current technology...

as to fast forwarding, no, if simulation is written correctly, it should obey all rules of the universe, therefore it would obey the rules of time, therefore, you would not be able to easily fast forward, without literaly inventing an algorithm that would predict what an atom is going to do in the next one billionth of a second....

[alexander]

actually, take that back, if you increase the speeds of chemical reactions, you should effectively spped up time, making it possible to fast forward through it, but only in a sense, and you would need exponentialy larger amounts of processing power to compute such things...

[Kizzi]

My USB Floppy drive may be constructed from 1 Billion atoms but as far as I'm concerned (in the simulation) I don't need to know about 1 Billion atoms....All I'm concerned with is the shape, colour and dust on it, so perhaps I've just saved the simulation 10 Billion Bytes of data. Only if I work in CERN would the simulation need to have data on atoms for the simulated scientists.

Or am I overlooking something????

KiZzI

[alexander]

no, in the simulation you really are concerned with the atoms, look, you are modeling the world, so you would have to collect all possible data you can get and model the big bang, then dust collects in clouds of hydrogen and helium gas and start fusing to make other elements, if you care for the reality of your simulation, and you are simulating the world to see what will happen in the future, it would be impossible to model every single object in the universe, hence if you program in all known laws of science (physics) and model the big bang such that the material distribution of atoms after the collapse is such that is at least similar to what happened during the bang, you should theoretically get to the universe as it is today, and then theoretically again, get to universe as it will be in the future...

[TheBigDog]

You could divide your computing into "macro" and "micro" items. By focusing on the macro you could save tons of processing, but the accuracy would diminish and be detected by those testing within the experiment. For example; the moon orbiting the earth is a macro calculation, the orbit effects the tides, the tides move sand on a beach, the sand covers a clam, a bird dies of starvation from not finding the clam, etc... As you keep going in you find more details that need to be accounted for. By doing the micro calculations you would keep everything in compliance with the rules, but the amount of detail is incomprehensible.

The missing piece is free will of the people simulated in the model. If people are in the model, they would behave in ways that would not be predictable by the model. So you would either have to give them randomness to their actions and accept the results, or create an algorithm to simulate probable actions that may effect the model. That is assuming that people would have any bearing at all on the final sum of 13 billions years of history.

Bill

[TheBigDog]

Doh!