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by IncRnd 1435 days ago
That's not what the twitter comment was talking about. It was saying that there are more states in 1KB than the number of atoms in the universe - or 2^8192 > 10^78.
1 comments

Which is why I support the unique strings— but as you can also tell from many comments, this is not easy for a lot of very technical folk.

What you’re saying is true— if you replace an abstract state with an atom — but the problem here is people are thinking about individual atoms, and not static arrangements of atoms in a in a universe.

Edit: Or, put another way, you changed the game. Of course there are more states in a kilobyte than the sheer number of atoms. But when you start claiming multiverses… no, it doesn’t work. Which the tweet did, and it confuses things.

I didn't change the game. That is literally what the tweet was conveying. It then expanded the first claim by what was also a correct statement that each atom could be replaced with a universe of atoms, and still that would not not exceed the number of states in a Kilobyte of memory.

What many people have done is interpret that to mean that somehow complexity theory is broken or that the tweet author was arguing for multiverses. It appears that not everyone actually read the tweet.

> What you’re saying is true— if you replace an abstract state with an atom

That is not at all what was written in my comment. There is no replacement being mentioned anywhere.

> and replaced it with a copy of the observable universe, and then did it again

Sorry, it was totally in the tweet. Literally used the word replaced