[keerthiko]

I had this thought when I was 13 and first learned the basics of programming "hey dad if everything is determined by physics and chemistry and computers are real good at math can't we analytically deduce the future."

I eventually learned this was just the 13 year old's version of "why's the sky blue?" into "but why is Rayleigh scattering a thing?" and there are several limitations to both human understanding of science, and theoretical computation limits -- a computer to have sufficient accuracy to model the world would by definition need to have as much memory as the world, and model itself in it. I moved on from that idea shortly after learning of that.

Is Stephen Wolfram just an overgrown child? Maybe unironically that's what being a genius is about.

[as300]

> a computer to have sufficient accuracy to model the world would by definition need to have as much memory as the world, and model itself in it.

But what if we had certain "compression" abilities that allowed us to simplify the world? Similar to how storing an audio codec lets us massively minimize how much storage we need for music?

[keerthiko]

Magical compression algorithms that have amazing compression ratios and amazingly computational cost to reasonably decompress to process the data could theoretically raise the upper bound of a computational world. But compression cannot solve for an unbounded recursion problem in the simulator having to model itself it's model of the world, unless we arrived at an analytical closed-form solution for any prediction rather than relying on any modeling.

[neuronexmachina]

Or use lossy compression and get quantization noise. The model would probably get pretty weird if you looked at a fine enough detail. ;)

[selimthegrim]

He did pay nice respects to Solomon Golomb (whose death anniversary was two days ago) so I’ll give him that.

https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/05/solomon-golomb-19322...