[simiansays]

Well yeah, it's big numbers! These sims (at least the ones I did) can never be compared to earth, because they make assumptions that start from maybe billions of years of simulated time, and then further make tons of ridiculous assumptions about life based on our observations from this one planet, and then they massively compress our physical reality from atomic and sub-atomic interactions to insanely granular abstractions in these sims.

("How much energy would it take to 100% accurately simulate our universe from the big bang to now" is a pretty interesting thought experiment though!)

I like that interesting period on Earth from maybe 4 billion years ago to maybe 500 million years ago, where we went from amoebas learning to duel to arthropods learning advanced dueling techniques. So any given one of my sims assumes a minimum of 10 billion years of priors, and assumes that it can compress millions and millions of generations and population diversity into a much smaller number.

I've had single sims where basic building blocks go from drunken amoeba to the earliest of pretty intelligent arthropods - so that's 3.5b years of evolution. But all sims are a massive tradeoff between fidelity and duration (fast/good/cheap), and the sims I like the most are the ones that cover an era that creates emergence in even a single aspect of the simulation. I guess most of what I'm interested in simulating is vaguely on the order of 100m years of evolution, over vaguely 7 days of real-time simulation?

[jrowen]

I wonder if we could develop any kind of rigor around knowing what certain systems are capable of, or at least some kind of framework for testing things out and being able to catalog and compare them.

I believe the sims need to tend towards less assumptions, more primordial soup, and more running time. We only have one reference point (billions of years of basic shit swirling around) and I feel like we need to start closer to that rather than skipping a bunch of stuff because it's too hard. Making things with so much baked in structure/assumptions doesn't seem to be providing the learning that we need. (I'm speaking in a very general sense, I don't mean this to come off as personal about you or your projects, they sound cool!)