[coldtea]

What part of this is "really bothering"?

We can make a simulation today, and have it obey such natural laws (of course programmed behavior) + logic (ditto), so that we could encode whatever we want inside a physical or geometrical constant as it appears inside the simulation.

[pacman128]

We can't make a simulation that changes the result of infinite series. They were computing pi, not measuring it. This wasn't changing the curvature of space, it was changing math itself.

[coldtea]

>We can't make a simulation that changes the result of infinite series.

Huh? It's trivial to do so. You just give the simulation the appropriate algebra that applies to all their measurements.

Not more difficult than setting 12=66 to programming languages that allow it (there are some, it can also be done in others like Python through some trickery [1]), and thus changing all the subsequent calculations done there.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/2441cv/can_you_chan...

[pacman128]

I'm not talking about physical measurements. How do you make a simulation that makes the sum of 0.9 + 0.09 + 0.009 + ... not equal to 1.0? It really comes down to whether math is universal. Maybe it's not, but I certainly don't see a trivial way to simulate this.

[lordnacho]

I haven't read the book, but I would imagine a story where you'd have a simulation where the maker decides that whenever the humans try to find pi by squeezing a polygon between two circles, you mess with them in the small digits. Similarly for the inverse squares sum.

Yet somehow a case is missed out, and some day someone asks the VM for pi in some other way, a discrepancy is found, and there you go...