Room 6 of 10
Two rectangles and a dot
Code Conference, 2016. Forty years from Pong to photoreal worlds with millions of simultaneous players. He asks what the flaw is.
Forty years ago we had Pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were. Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it’s getting better every year.
If any remaining improvement continues, even a thousand times slower, games become indistinguishable from reality on evolutionary timescales. Billions of such machines. Therefore, he says, the odds this is base reality are one in billions.
Bostrom’s 2003 paper is the formal neighbor: a trilemma. Possible flaws exist. This tree keeps them in view.
The sister world Are We in a Simulation? lets the same Pong grammar stand up, acquire a field, and asks at what point it became a world. You can walk that after this room.
- The simulation argumentPong to photoreal. Bostrom’s trilemma next door.
- Player & avatarIf life is a video game, someone is playing, someone is being played, and the tutorial is too long.