A new physics paper suggests that we may all be living in the ultimate 4X strategy game after all

HardwareA new physics paper suggests that we may all be living in the ultimate 4X strategy game after allWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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Have you heard of the simulation hypothesis? It’s the idea that the universe, as we perceive it, is essentially a form of simulated reality and it’s been explored ingenuine scientific research,philosophical texts, and major plot devices in numerous films. Well, a new physics research paper on thenature of informationclaims that if its findings were to be empirically validated, it would be a major piece of evidence for the notion that we’re all living in the grandest giant 4X strategy game of all time.

News of the paper’s release(viaMSN) has been understandably popular in general science reporting. The researcher in question, Dr Melvin Vopson, has spent a good portion of his career in physics investigating information theory, going as far as to propose a universal law calledthe second law of information dynamics, based on an earlier theory of his called themass-energy-information equivalence principle.

“The second law of infodynamics appears to be manifesting universally and is, in fact, a cosmological necessity, we could conclude that this points to the fact that the entire universe appears to be a simulated construct,” he writes.

“A super complex universe like ours, if it were a simulation, would require a built-in data optimization and compression mechanism in order to reduce the computational power and the data storage requirements.”

Dr Vopson doesn’t exactly present an overwhelming amount of evidence to back up the latter—his suggestion that the prevalence of symmetry in nature is essentially tantamount to a compression algorithm is about the size of it—but his work certainly makes one ponder just exactly what would a computer running the universe be like.

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The CPU alone would need quite a few cores and the clock speed would be pretty high too, as processes in the sub-atomic world take place over such short periods that anything running in the GHz region would be millions of orders too slow.

Your next machine(Image credit: Future)Best gaming PC: The top pre-built machines.Best gaming laptop: Great devices for mobile gaming.

Your next machine

(Image credit: Future)Best gaming PC: The top pre-built machines.Best gaming laptop: Great devices for mobile gaming.

(Image credit: Future)

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Best gaming PC: The top pre-built machines.Best gaming laptop: Great devices for mobile gaming.

Then there’s the sheer amount of memory, RAM or non-volatile storage, required to keep track of every single particle in the whole universe. And imagine how much energy would be used to run it? It’d make a1000 W superchiplook absolutely lightweight, in comparison.

Then again, I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if it turns out the universe is actually just an extremely grindy MMORPG and humanity is still a couple of billions of years away from accumulating enough experience points to hit the next level.

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