Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/07/recreating-our-galaxy-in-a-sup.html
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Recreating Our Galaxy in a Supercomputer
Almost, kinda in a sort’a way.
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And you nerds want to upload your consciousness to a system where one star is one pixel?
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This entire research project was probably just the side effect of an elaborate excuse for playing Stellaris on work computers.
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No. Maybe.
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Assuming some variation of Moore’s law continues (play along please), is there a level of modelling complexity where it becomes morally risky to shut off the computer?
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Lamar Smith: “Any practical applications? Like, um, can this simulation show me where I left my keys?”
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Today I am getting a lot of milage out of this GIF.
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Yes, but can the supercomputer simulate our galaxy and said galaxy-simulating supercomputer within it? :mind_blown:
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Some point between IBM’s experimental 7nm CPU and Bremermann’s limit (beyond which any faster calculation collapses into a black hole because information is equivalent to energy and the Schwarzschild solution to Einstein’s field equation places an upper bound on energy density before gravity becomes nonlinear and collapses in on itself, at which point, with all due consideration to any accidental simulacra, we’ll have problems of our own)…
“The conjecture is the following: No data processing system whether artificial or living can process more than (2 ×1047) bits per second per gram of its mass.”
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I find it difficult to understand how they can accurately simulate the formation of a galaxy without fully accounting for what dark matter is.
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Has anyone made minecraft within minecraft yet?
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Sort of. They’ve created an infinite desert, which can be used to make a universe simulator, which, in turn, can have a new instance of Minecraft spawned within it…
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“A Bunch of Rocks” is my favorite Randall Munroe cartoon of all time (pun totally intended, deal with it).
The hover text is “I call Rule 34 on Wolfram’s Rule 34”, which itself is a recursive joke on two different meanings of rule 34 (If it exists, there is porn of it, no exceptions) and British mathematician Stephen Wolfram’s rules for cellular automata (a type of program that functions much as the rocks in the comic do).
It’s math laughs all the way down, folks.
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You seen the wiki?
http://explainxkcd.com/505/
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I didn’t even know there was one! Thanks!!! So cool.
ETA: Hey, his characters have names! You seriously just made my day.
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