[norrius]

That reminds me of a story where a student couldn't figure out the properties of some physical system, so he ran a massive simulation of a universe with laws of physics similar to his own (but, of course, cutting corners whenever possible). This universe eventually produced a life form intelligent enough to figure out the necessary equations, at which point he happily copied them to his homework and forgot about the simulation.

...only to find it days later (= billions of years of simulated time), by which point the simulated life had figured out that their universe was written hastily and its laws were full of subtle bugs, like floating-point rounding errors showing up in physical measurements. Their technological advance let them move stars around, which they grumpily arranged in a message saying "your code sucks".

Can't find it at the moment, does anyone recognise the reference? It could be in one of these books, I suppose, but I don't have them.

[jakear]

Relatedly, I’ve always found quantum mechanics to be reasonable “proof” that we’re living in a simulation.

Take wave-partical duality: how is that not an artifact of the implementors wanting to reuse some core routines from an legacy particle-based universe while building our next-gen wave based one? The particle-based simulation wouldn’t work at the scales needed, so they moved to waves (much easier to simulate), and rigged up some adaptors to switch to particle mode in a JIT manner as needed.

The folks trying to unify quantum and classical mechanics are essentially reverse-engineering that JIT (and others like it).

[TeMPOraL]

A short story along similar lines, though less of a joke and more of an Aesop's Fable: That Alien Message by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien....

[goldenkey]

Could that be Dibb's Dilemma?