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from the that's-what-we-want-you-to-think dept.
Physicists have "confirmed" that we "aren't" "living" in a computer "simulation":
Scientists have discovered that it's impossible to model the physics of our universe on even the biggest computer.
What that means is that we're probably not living in a computer simulation.
Theoretical physicists Zohar Ringel and Dmitry Kovrizhin from the University of Oxford and the Hebrew University in Israel applied Monte Carlo simulations (computations used to generate probabilities) to quantum objects moving through various dimensions and found that classical systems cannot create the mathematics necessary to describe quantum systems. They showed this by proving that classical physics can't erase the sign problem, a particular quirk of quantum Monte Carlo simulations of gravitational anomalies (like warped spacetime, except in this case the researchers used an analogue from condensed matter physics).
Therefore, according to Ringel and Kovrizhin, classical computers most certainly aren't controlling our universe.
Which type of computers are we being simulated on?
Also at Newsweek.
Quantized gravitational responses, the sign problem, and quantum complexity (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1701758) (DX)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DECbot on Thursday October 05 2017, @02:57AM (3 children)
It must be running on a massive quantum computer.
Messages from $god are just hackers fuzzing various processes to affect the computer's output.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 4, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Thursday October 05 2017, @06:30AM (2 children)
It could just as well be that quantum mechanics is a vast simplification of the laws of the universe of the computer. Because a full simulation of that universe's law would be intractable for a computer in that universe.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @02:13AM (1 child)
> Because a full simulation of that universe's law would be intractable for a computer in that universe.
Because a full simulation of that universe's laws and states would be intractable for a computer in that universe.
FTFY.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday October 09 2017, @05:05AM
That's not a fix, that's a change from a possible claim to a different, certain claim.
You can have universes that are governed by the same laws, yet aren't identical.
And Gödel's theorem is again something different, namely that proving every true statement is impossible for sufficiently complex mathematical systems. Note that there are inner models of ZFC (the commonly agreed on set theory), despite ZFC definitely being complex enough for Gödel's theorem to apply. It's just that those models cannot prove every truth about themselves.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.