[rags2riches]

I can't claim to understand the first thing about quantum mechanics, but whenever I read about it I always come to think of lazy evaluation. Then I want to know if it's there simply for performance reasons or if it's to enable an infinite universe.

[procedural_love]

This is a line of reasoning that some physicists are exploring: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.00058

> "Can the theory that reality is a simulation be tested? We investigate this question based on the assumption that if the system performing the simulation is finite (i.e. has limited resources), then to achieve low computational complexity, such a system would, as in a video game, render content (reality) only at the moment that information becomes available for observation by a player and not at the moment of detection by a machine (that would be part of the simulation and whose detection would also be part of the internal computation performed by the Virtual Reality server before rendering content to the player). Guided by this principle we describe conceptual wave/particle duality experiments aimed at testing the simulation theory."

Here's the kickstarter they (successfully) ran to fund some of the experiments: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/simulation/do-we-live-i...

[cheeko1234]

Just read the 'it from bit' paper referenced in the article. Wheeler goes quite in depth into why "turtles all the way down" is not a solution.

http://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/wheeler.pdf

[sideshowb]

If you were simulating the universe it certainly doesn't help performance having to simulate an exponential quantity of interfering states rather than a single classical one. It's anything but lazy evaluation.

[carterehsmith]

I remember when the "proceduraly generated" games first showed up - 30 years ago?

You could get a billion different scenarios, each one involving a million locations.

None of them existed before you started playing the game. And generating all of them in advance would be a) impossible, given the memory requirements and b) a huge waste, considering that 99.99999% of the players never needed to experience 99.99999% of the scenarios.

So what they did, they only presented up what is "observable" to you, the player.

So there is some saving there.

[gowld]

That's not an answer to the concern. Classical mechanics has no foundation -- it's a large castle floating in the air. Quantum mechanics tries to start from much less less assumed "something from nothing structure", which is puts much more complexity in sight (instead of just hiding it in axioms) that needs to be managed somehow.

If you want purely high-performance model of the Universe, nothing performs better than "everything you observe is simply invented the moment you invent it", be it classical or quantum.