[rl3]

While I appreciate your question and realize what you're asking, I hope you don't mind my going a bit off topic here:

>Let's assume you have nearly infinite computation resources.

I think it's more fun to assume you don't. You need not simulate every water molecule in the ocean for life to emerge.

Imagine you had a hash table of precomputed interactions between various simulation elements across all scales. In such a system, the computational cost of simulating a single protein would be similar to that of two galaxies colliding.

A planet for example would simply be a vast hierarchy containing a chain of approximated behaviors, each node in that chain containing its own hierarchy.

The really fun part is trying to envision how changes at very low levels in this chain would ripple upwards and affect the simulation at larger scales. Thus far I've only imagined it as analog to node invalidation in a typical scene graph data structure, where you flag it "dirty" and it's queued for recomputation on the next frame.

[calmchaos]

Good comment, thanks! It's indeed possible to approximate highly complex systems and interactions with generated models surprisingly accurately. But I'm more interested in the lowest possible level of rules and interactions.

In our current universe we are still seeking the "theory of everything" - a model that would explain physics at all levels. Currently it seems that everything breaks down at (sub)quantum level.

But I think that our universe is logical, exact and that all higher level observable interactions are based on some really simple fundamental rules. The problem is that we can't measure or detect those properly. For example Quantum Entanglement is one big issue but yet it is also based on a rule. If the rule is always enforced logically, it doesn't have to comply with the rudimentary model of physics by humans. Perhaps we are too fixed on the idea that light speed is the absolute limit to every interaction? :)

To me it seems unavoidable that the fundamental rules and basic elements of our universe have been purposefully designed. The measured standard model values even imply that those values have been calibrated to those exact values by simulation.

I also believe that our universe is not the only universe (energy in certain 3D area of the void governed by a set of distinct rules for that particular experiment) and that our universe is not the first or the last.

If "intelligence" can be born inside a computer simulation, it's also possible to have "nested universums" where simulated intelligence creates a new virtual universum inside the virtual universum where the intelligence was born in.

A related example would be that a human created AI creates a new better AI system independently and those AI systems can keep evolving and generating new stuff without any human interaction with the system.

[rl3]

In thinking about this, I concluded the subatomic/quantum levels were far beyond my ability to comprehend or model accurately (if at all) since I'm not a physicist. Furthermore, both are still on the forefront of discovery and not fully understood.

Therefore, I reasoned that these low-level rules you're talking about may manifest upward in scale. If you created layered approximations of observable behavior, you could essentially capture the output of these rules even if not directly discovering them at a low level.

If you have a protein, a plant, planet and galaxy all on equal footing in terms of how they're approximated and simulated, then perhaps one could factor out commonality from each and deduce some sort of low-level rules from that.

With respect to our reality being an ancestor simulation, I'd say it's highly likely. You might be interested in looking at Bostrom's simulation hypothesis, if you already haven't.

[karmakaze]

This would be the most fun for me. Model the lowest levels of physical laws by creating a simulation universe of a very small volume and see how to make behaviours computable. Only rule is that you can't freeze time in the simulated universe while computing. So first off there has to be propagation limits to effects (or at least observability limits) within the simulated universe.

The best way to make this scalable might be to make each observer a CPU.