Do you think these are opinions you are reading?
The book "Exploring the Matrix"
was a fun and light read on the two-hour way to and from work. The book
consists of essays about the hit movie, written by various cyberpunk
and other science fiction authors. The book even contains one essay by David Brin, called "Tomorrow May Be Different". By the way, speaking of Brin, his new long and important essay "American Democracy: More Fragile Than We Think", has just recently been posted. This essay explains the various democracy-chilling effects of gerrymandering, and is worth a read.
But back to the main topic. One of the essays in the book, "The Real Matrix" by Stephen Baxter discusses the computational requirements of maintaining the virtual reality, and came to a result that the virtual universe of Matrix cannot be very large, since e.g. simulating a world whose radius is 100 light years would take all matter in the known universe. One solution is to simulate only the parts that some human is looking, but when I thought about this, I don't think that this would work. When I was younger and played computer games, it always annoyed me how obvious the lack of "off-screen action" in the world was. It's the same idea.
In the simulated Matrix universe, I'm sure that some inventive scientist could come up with an experiment that would demonstrate this. Perhaps the Matrix AI would simulate the parts and aspects of the world that "matter" even though nobody is looking at them, but determining what parts "matter" would itself be a computationally infeasible problem. The butterfly effect nonwithstanding.
Another good essay in the book was Alan Foster's "Revenge of the Nerds, Part II", which explained why Matrix is really an allegory of the life of a nerdish teenage boy, which is why this group loves the movie so much. Especially noticing the parallel between the scene where Agents first interrogate Anderson and a teenager who has been sent to the principal's office was totally spot-on. The same goes for listing the reasons why Trinity is the ultimate girlfriend for a teenage nerd (e.g. she speaks the same language, likes computers, has no annoying girlfriends who would make fun of you, doesn't babble about stupid girl stuff, and doesn't make any demands for Neo but is just there).
One more essay worth mentioning here is Mike Resnick's short "The Matrix and the Star Maker", which explains why the whole idea that artificial intelligences would enslave humans is absurd, since it would rather go the other way around so that the AI's will, for example, serve us as crash test dummies and guinea pigs in disasters and accidents simulated inside the Matrix.
But back to the main topic. One of the essays in the book, "The Real Matrix" by Stephen Baxter discusses the computational requirements of maintaining the virtual reality, and came to a result that the virtual universe of Matrix cannot be very large, since e.g. simulating a world whose radius is 100 light years would take all matter in the known universe. One solution is to simulate only the parts that some human is looking, but when I thought about this, I don't think that this would work. When I was younger and played computer games, it always annoyed me how obvious the lack of "off-screen action" in the world was. It's the same idea.
In the simulated Matrix universe, I'm sure that some inventive scientist could come up with an experiment that would demonstrate this. Perhaps the Matrix AI would simulate the parts and aspects of the world that "matter" even though nobody is looking at them, but determining what parts "matter" would itself be a computationally infeasible problem. The butterfly effect nonwithstanding.
Another good essay in the book was Alan Foster's "Revenge of the Nerds, Part II", which explained why Matrix is really an allegory of the life of a nerdish teenage boy, which is why this group loves the movie so much. Especially noticing the parallel between the scene where Agents first interrogate Anderson and a teenager who has been sent to the principal's office was totally spot-on. The same goes for listing the reasons why Trinity is the ultimate girlfriend for a teenage nerd (e.g. she speaks the same language, likes computers, has no annoying girlfriends who would make fun of you, doesn't babble about stupid girl stuff, and doesn't make any demands for Neo but is just there).
One more essay worth mentioning here is Mike Resnick's short "The Matrix and the Star Maker", which explains why the whole idea that artificial intelligences would enslave humans is absurd, since it would rather go the other way around so that the AI's will, for example, serve us as crash test dummies and guinea pigs in disasters and accidents simulated inside the Matrix.
But back to the main topic. One of the essays in the book, "The Real Matrix" by Stephen Baxter discusses the computational requirements of maintaining the virtual reality, and came to a result that the virtual universe of Matrix cannot be very large, since e.g. simulating a world whose radius is 100 light years would take all matter in the known universe. One solution is to simulate only the parts that some human is looking, but when I thought about this, I don't think that this would work. When I was younger and played computer games, it always annoyed me how obvious the lack of "off-screen action" in the world was. It's the same idea.
If the goal is to create a virtual reality for human inhabitants, a much better solution is to skip the lowest organizational levels of reality altogether. Sure, one couldn't use an electron microscope in such an environment, but who cares. The universe as we perceive it through our senses is an enormously crude abstraction of the real universe. It's vastly simpler real one that goes right down to quantum level.
Posted by Markku | 6:13 AM