Times of India reports, "The experiments being conducted by University of Washington could prove that we are merely pawns in some kind of larger computer game. However, it is unclear who created these super computers that may hypothetically power our existence."

  • charming.quark

    Well the ANSWER is 42…

    • jimh

      Thanks for all the fish!

  • silkox

    Now, that’s what I call intelligent design!

  • silkox

    Or, come to think of it, and in light of recent events, christ, what an asshole!

  • mcaron00

    I for one welcome our new uber-nerd overlords!

  • http://twitter.com/incarnedine_v Dan Hibiki

     This MMORG went down hill after the last expansion pack.

  • http://www.facebook.com/taps7734 Chris Patterson

    I blame the mice.

  • GawainLavers
  • Andrew Singleton

    Given what all I’ve done in the Sims….

    Q.Q

    Dis gonna suck.

  • http://profile.yahoo.com/4TS77Q7S2EOHIDY3PZHV4TE54E Paul

    A couple clarifications. The article says “string theory indicates there are 10,500 universes..”  It’s actual roughly 10^500 solutions to the equations that define string theory that would create universes roughly like ours. Which is a separate question from whether any of them (besides ours) exist.

    Also, the experiment wouldn’t prove we’re in a simulation at all. It’s looking for whether space and time are fundamentally quantized: Is space a continuous thing you can always subdivide, or are things ordered onto a grid? If it is ordered onto a grid, that’s sort of like how we use pixels as a fundamental unit displaying video games. But there’s no reason a quantized space-time would require that everything is a simulation, the universe could just fundamentally work that way.

    • Lexicat

      I am always fascinated by the metaphor “The Universe Is…” which, while not particularly informative from a scientific perspective, give scads of insight into the day-to-day world view of the statement’s author:

      The Universe Is Divine Will (theocratic word view)
      The Universe Is Clockwork (after Newton world view) 
      The Universe Is Energy (after Einstein world view)
      The Universe Is Information (after Shannon world view)
      The Universe Is A Computer Simulation (after ubiquitous computing world view)

    • awjt

       Comma, caret, what’s the difference?

  • Dave X

    The Times of India also reports that it is high as hell.

  • https://launchpad.net/~zak-mckracken Zak McKracken

    Nonono, that computer _is_ our universe :)

    Also, that guy should really learn the first thing about computer science, which is that you need a machine with at least as many degrees of freedom (or as many states) as the thing that you’re trying to simulate. That means: A computer contained in our universe can — unlike what they say in the article — only simulate a universe much smaller than itself, if the physics are supposed to be the same.

    • Dr_Wadd

      That assumes that you model our entire universe with as much detail as possible. Distant stars and galaxies could be simulated with much simpler models that fit the resolution we can observe, there’s no point in simulating the sub-atomic world if we can’t directly verify it for a remote location. You’d get away with simulating the macroscopic aspects with just enough realism to match what we expect from more local observations.

      I’ve always liked to think that foggy days are when the simulation we live in needs to devote resources elsewhere and has to drop the draw distance.

      • CH

        “I’ve always liked to think that foggy days are when the simulation we live in needs to devote resources elsewhere and has to drop the draw distance.”
        Yep, that’s what I always assume. I try to catch it in the middle of drawing stuff at the edge of the fog barrier. Oh, and have you noticed how sometimes the same thing starts to appear everywhere (say, you learn a new word, and suddenly you see & hear it everywhere)… cache! Everything cannot be loaded into the memory all the time, so it reuses stuff that is in the cache.

        Oh… and the graphics artists tend to occasionally get carried away a bit. For instance, the sun “god rays” tend to be waaaaaay overdone to look realistic. And just the other day when I looked out the window the snow was going all around like we were in a giant snow globe getting shaken around. Yeah, right… guys, it needs to be realistic!

      • jmzero

        This perspective also makes sense of some quantum weirdness.  The universe only bothers to resolve normally irrelevant quantum phenomenon when there’s an observer.

  • http://www.disoriented.net/ angusm

    EXPERIMENTER’S NOTEBOOK, DAY 317: Another simulation terminated successfully, with the simulated life-forms once again showing that they could detect that they existed in a simulation. I’m starting to think that this may be a universal property of intelligence. I rebooted the sim with slightly different initial parameters, to see if varying the Q constant has any effect on emergent self-knowledge.

    I wonder if the simulated organisms feel anything as the sim reboots, or if it all happens too fast for them to detect it? Maybe I should program a flashy end-sequence, with meteors and earthquakes and tsunamis. I have to admit, I get kind of a kick out of watching them running and screaming. A whole planet-full doing it all at once would be awesome. Must find some time to work on that after I’ve written up the results of this run.

    • Andrew Singleton

      Weird. The little people are building structures and congregating to form idiograms… .No scratch that. They’re spelling something.

      F. U. C…. Oh dear lord they DO understand what’s going to happen.

  • unnaturalatheism

    Obviously, the simulators would cause our machines to record data consistent with not being in a simulation, right?

    • awjt

       We haven’t found any ripples in the Matrix yet… but I imagine someday we will.

    • Drabula

      But then who’s to say whether this particular simulation might or might not be purposely set up to observe the very process of simulation-realization.

  • http://profiles.google.com/kisnerp Peter Kisner

    More fun (at least I liked) fiction on the subject:
    The House Beyond Your Sky

    • FoolishOwl

       That was excellent.

  • PathogenAntifreeze

    Another SMBC comic addresses this perfectly: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2535

  • Hugh Jorgan

    I highly recommend this Radiolab, which proves that we are more likely to be part of a simulation than not:

    http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2008/aug/12/the-multi-universes/

  • http://profile.yahoo.com/AJN7EQBIYJIR7PGKV3LOZCXQBA Jim

    Okay, try this then… picture an atom. The atom has a nucleus and electrons circling it in an obit(s).  It is the smallest thing we can comprehend.. now think of our sun as the nucleus and the planets in our solar system as electrons of that nucleus.  We could actually be mere specs onan electron of an atom of something unimaginably large..

    • andygates

      That one’s fun, but it doesn’t get past kid’s cartoons, really.  We can see the large structure of our universe.

      • Shashwath T.R.

        Also, the electrons don’t exactly have elliptical orbits; their orbitals are more like probability densities with some fairly complex shapes…

        The electron circling a nucleus is the venerable Bohr model, not QM…

  • Boundegar

    Wait, how did Onan get into the story?

    • http://twitter.com/Listener43 Listener43

       Onanism is, after all, basically a simulation ….

  • John Irvine

    A simulation of what?  Some other universe that ours is a model of?  If this here one is an exact simulation, but not the real one,  then what’s the fuss?  Unless it is an imperfect simulation.  That just means that the original one is somehow better than our pale simulation – maybe socks don’t go missing there. 

  • Cowicide

    Any news on who’s winning this game?

  • lafave

    I appreciate the nude mods but I think the political system needs a patch.

    • CH

      Yeah, and the game balance is all effed up.

  • http://walkingwithshimmer.wordpress.com/ Werther deGoethe

    In other words, Philip K. Dick was right.

  • Andrew Singleton

    Queston. Do we sound like simmish to them?

  • Silicon Scherazade

    So does that mean the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is just the result of low resolution? 

    • Andrew Singleton

      Could be, but could you imagin the job it took programming in quantium mechanics as a patch to not have to deal with absolute tracking? Good god that’d probably be some of the ugliest code in existential.

      • awjt

         It’s poorly commented, too, the rat-bastards
        /fuct

  • Scotia Mas

    So there’s a chance I’m not living in a simulation? Well, crap. I was sort of counting on this being a simulation.

  • http://profile.yahoo.com/NQLMSDBFKAJPUZ2LTUFOY7GJ2U ChrisG

    It’s simultations all the way down.

  • timquinn

    Um, if the universe is a simulation then it is not a simulation. See what I am getting at?

  • Guest

    Well, I hope they have a good backup strategy.

  • http://profiles.google.com/spacewatcer Marios P.

    did anybody read the article saying that our current solar system has about 2.5% chance of forming the way it is today?

  • http://twitter.com/that_music Alex Cooper

    A very obvious problem with this article:
    - the very first word indicates that the article was written in Melbourne (not India), but is talking about a study done in the US
    - no mention is given of the author’s name or where they actually work

  • http://twitter.com/that_music Alex Cooper

    Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand putting the first paragraph into google turns up this article  http://www.news.com.au/technology/experiments-to-see-if-the-universe-exists-within-a-computer-simulation-from-the-future/story-e6frfro0-1226536251540 that makes a lot more sense, even if the science still seems a bit sketchy.

  • http://twitter.com/markmcan Mark McAndrew

    Would explain wave-particle. It really is an equation, and only resolved when observed.

    It’s all just grey nothingness behind your head…

  • Shinkuhadoken

    Beverly Crusher: Here’s a question you shouldn’t be able to answer: Computer, what is the nature of the universe?
    Computer: The universe is a spheroid region, 705 meters in diameter.

  • FoolishOwl

    I’m feeling better about that game of Civilization V I’m playing with my stepson, in which there’s never been armed conflict in the history of the world. I hope those sims appreciate it.

  • Frank W

    And by the way, the simulation will run till Friday.