Some thoughts on the "simulation" research…

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Recent research has attempted to mathematically quantify the probability that we are running in a computer simulation. The arguments made are plausible, but the researcher ultimately just guesses a 20% probability based on his “gut instinct”, which is hardly scientific. Since I am a staunch nondeterminist, it would take more than this to convince me. However, let’s assume the researcher is correct for the sake of argument. For a culture to conceive of a computer powerful enough to simulate not only the structure of the universe, but also the intelligence of the “NPCs” (that is, us), it would need to be quite advanced. Since any culture that advanced must have a significant measure of intelligence, it also stands that at least some among them are themselves nondeterminists (from a simply philosophical point of view, having nothing to do with one’s understanding of physics). Thus, paradoxically, we would expect the world to be more random than it is. If the simulation in question were some sort of game, as some have postulated, I would expect that it would also be more epic (though this would very heavily depend on what is considered entertainment by whoever is doing the simulating).

Additionally, if a 20% probability exists that we are in a simulated universe, what of the one doing the simulating? Since the researchers assume nothing about the actual structure of the universe, that means that universe should also have a 20% chance of being simulated. As the number of universes approaches infinity, the probability that they are all simulated approaches 0, but the problem would become computationally intractable by even the most advanced computers long before that happened (regardless of the power of a computer that a civilization could build, each successive simulation would require a more powerful computer, as it would need to emulate the capabilities of the computers inside of the simulation). Thus the researcher’s assumption that it is highly probable that a computer powerful enough to simulate the universe exists may be flawed.

Finally, there is the question of actual theoretical intractability, which is probably my strongest counterargument. Regardless of the laws of physics, the laws of mathematics are largely independent of the universe we live in. Some of the processes within the universe are NP-complete or EXPTIME-complete, and do not lend themselves to solutions for large numbers of input even on the fastest of computers. When dealing with the scale of a universe, the numbers are immense, and the processes taking place would be simply impossible to simulate unless every atom was itself a computer. This is highly improbable in a simulation for a number of reasons, chief among them that the overhead of communicating between these systems to create a singe undivided universe would be greater than that of solving the problem in the first place and that from an engineering perspective, it would make more sense to centralize the operations of this system so it would be easier to manage and monitor.

That’s another thing – if this were a simulation, we would expect “backdoors” built into the universe. Even if we could not use these, we should expect evidence of their use by those simulating the universe. And since they’re running things, there is a chance that they’re keeping track of us, as intelligent beings (even if we’re not the subject of this simulation, which is quite possible) every so often, in which case we would expect them to have made contact already.

Coming up with compositions vs. writing them

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I’ve figured out why it’s so easy for me to think up new compositions but difficult for me to actually write them down: one can intuitively think up songs; in fact, this is how it’s usually done (Fi might play a role too, but it’s a minor one). However, writing them down is a strictly introverted sensory activity… and on the MBTI, Si is the least preferred of the functions by the INTJ type.

But I need to go through the work if my music is to become real.

Google Street View and Privacy

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I mentioned to several of my interviewers that privacy concerns would soon erupt over the new street view (and proposed ideas to mitigate those concerns). None of them took this warning seriously at the time (they have good programmers there, but appear to be somewhat lacking in visionaries), but sure enough, I saw this in the IEEE mailing today…

"4. Marketplace of Ideas: Are Google Maps Too Close for Comfort?
Google recently unveiled a free map service called Street View, which
shows ground-level views of specific locations. Type in an address, and
you can zoom in on a photo of that site and whatever is there--a house,
parked cars, or even people. The service has stirred up concerns over
loss of privacy, with some worried that their address, their car's license
plate, or even their face will show up online. For example, the site has
shown women sunbathing on a school campus. Google says the photos
are taken in public locations, so they're no different from what someone
would see walking down the street. What do you think of Google's Street
View service? Weigh in at <mailto:institute@ieee.org>"

Relativism

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While walking, I came up with an interesting argument for relativism, which is one of the philosophies I extend in my “Treatise on the Objective Reality of Ideas”: support I take two pictures of a tree, one with a very short exposure time, one with a very long one. Which is the truth? Well, both of them reflect the image of the same real-world tree, and yet one would certainly appear more “tree-like” than the other (ala Plato)… yet if the perspective is changed (extending the exposure time), the very concept of what a tree is can change.

Let’s take the analogy even further. What if we take a photo of a tree and digitally enhance it? (Nothing too complicated that would lose the image of the tree; let’s say we just normalize the image’s histogram). Is the enhanced photo still a tree? What would the distinction be between enhancing the photo in software and changing the capture parameters on the camera? What if the camera could perform normalization directly?

Even better, what if a photo was, say, underexposed, and was digitally corrected to more closely resemble the real-world scene that it was meant to capture? The enhancements are “fake”, but they more closely match reality than the unenhanced photo!

The point I’m trying to drive at is that it’s foolish to say that any single image of the tree is the image of the tree. There is an entire family (technically of infinite size) of images that could pass as a tree.

So what you perceive as a tree depends on you.

Books on composing classical music

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Why can’t I find books on composing classical music? I can find books on individual components of compositions, such as harmony and counterpoint, but not on composition in the classical tradition (which is, incidentally, the title of a book that has nothing to do with composition or music; it’s apparently on an ancient Greek form of argument). Does no one care, or have too many people moved to a different style by now?

I always feel as if I’m missing something when I write music (probably training), because I can hear entire pieces springing fully formed into my mind, but I can never write them. I have a fairly well-developed sense of relative pitch by this point and I still can’t write down the music without having to undergo a tedious trial-and-error sort of process. For me, writing is a chore, but the glory of composition, as distinct from writing, motivates me to complete pieces.

Skyglasses

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Glasses that annotate positions in the sky (say with star names) based on orientation would be most useful in meteor watching and other various stargazing activities.

Perseids

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I’m somewhat disappointed. All that time waiting and only one photo with a faint meteor trail to show for it.

I might be getting very good at conventional photography, but I’m still a complete n00b at astrophotography. I spent over an hour out there, seeing nearly nothing in the sky and capturing even less. Eventually, I was forced in, as it was becoming cloudy. I believe I was looking in the right place (I saw Mars), but there may have been too much light, even in NJ. I needed a rural area for this one.

The day certainly wasn’t a complete loss, though; among other photos, I took this while it was still light out:

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/62169122/

If I cared at all about getting views/favorites/recognition, I would submit this at a time other than 2 AM, but I don’t. I’ve done my part in making my art and ideas available to the world. If the world wants to reap the benefits, it’s up to the world to use them. If not, so be it; the consequences of a lost idea naturally follow.

Reminiscing on Rudenid

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I make it a point to list Metasquarer, one of the masterworks of my childhood, on my resume. I’m proud to have demonstrated such a masterful grasp of programming, AI, and even algorithms at such an early age, for I was only 12 when I wrote it, and I do sometimes refer to it as the “magnum opus” of my childhood. However, for a relatively brief period between the ages of 15 and 18, I accomplished something that is perhaps even more impressive, and yet almost no one even knows that it was my work in the first place. It certainly isn’t on my resume. For even though I strive to be the best in every field I enter, it wasn’t until I was the best that I knew I could accomplish this on a larger scale. In this sense, my success at that critical moment opened the floodgates for all of the spectacular failures I am fighting society’s tide to avoid, for it was here that I utterly mastered my first skill.

Everyone attributes my success in the Ultima Online emulation community to “Rudenid”, which was the handle I uniquely used in the SphereServer and Irth communities. I left nearly no trace of my actual identity, for I didn’t see the need to associate my UO activities with the work I was doing with Metasquarer.

As always, my schoolwork was underchallenging, but at the time, this did not bother me for two reasons: I was receiving the same education as everyone else (a view that has instilled a great disgust for the standard system of secondary education in me, because the standard model caters strictly to the lowest common denominator), so I didn’t need to worry about inherent inequalities in training and could instead breeze through classrooms on intelligence alone (to the extent that I wouldn’t do homework because I already understood the material, thus receiving excellent grades on tests but mediocre overall grades due to zeros on homework), and I had already demonstrated programming competence far beyond my peers, most of whom either couldn’t program at all or were just writing their first programs.

So I did what every bored kid does after school: I played games. I still maintained Metasquarer, of course, but it was stable and the community was thriving by that time, so maintaining it did not require much work. Though I was conscious of society’s problems at that age (for that matter, I was conscious of society’s problems for as long as I could remember – in particular, I wanted to take action to stop global warming since I was six, shame on the rest of you for not even agreeing that there was a problem until recently), I did not have the compelling altruism that I later developed, and as someone who was constantly tortured by other students and faculty alike when all I wished was to be left alone, I was perfectly content to let society solve its own problems. So, as I said, I played games, including one called “Ultima Online”. Referred to the game by Jesse Alter, one of the three friends I would have before college (we later lost touch), I was directed to two free shards. The name of the first escapes me, but as soon as I created a character on it, I was immediately ambushed and killed by someone riding a llama who apparently decided to welcome “n00bs” to the server in his own special way. I left that shard almost immediately.

The second shard I joined was a roleplaying shard known as First Sundering. I knew nothing of Ultima lore (which is surprisingly rich) at the time, so I generally took “roleplaying” as “speaking in Elizabethan English”, which I was an expert at thanks to my many readings of Arthurian legends. I originally wanted to choose the name “Zandar”, after a character in an RPG I had just developed, but a character named “Zander” already existed on the server, so I chose “Rudenid” (another character) instead. First Sundering required an application for accounts, but their standards were not very high: after a week of eager waiting, I was welcomed to the shard, despite knowing little about what roleplaying was truly about.

What a difference! The community was helpful in the extreme, and it wasn’t long before I had much of what I was doing down thanks to their guidance. While on FS, I developed my character into a powerful mage (who crafted bows, of all things, in his spare time!) It was the perfect escape from the misery that defined my life from 6 to 2.

Unfortunately, while the shard’s playerbase was everything that could be asked for, the shard’s leadership was rather inept. After a series of successive bad decisions, culminating in a shard reversion that cost everyone nearly a month of progress, I left. Only a few months later, the shard folded, scattering the community. First Sundering was indeed an appropriate name for the shard.

Some members simply left UO altogether. Others found other shards. I did neither. From First Sundering, I had learned of “SphereServer”, the scriptable server that FA was powered by. At first, I simply toyed with being a Game Master on a test shard I called “MetaShard”. However, I very quickly decided to seriously start a roleplaying shard in the vein of FS. This shard was originally called “Endless Void” (Jesse’s idea as a member of the staff), but initially failed to attract players due to the relative sparsity of the world and the fact that building such a community is endosocial (an existing player population is required to attract players to the shard in the first place, resulting in a nasty feedback loop and a very difficult launch; see my previous posting on “exosocial” and “endosocial” communities).

But I was never one to let poor adoption of my ideas hinder me. After a policy disagreement with Jesse, he left and I changed the name of the shard to “Final Aegis”, where it would remain. At that point, I became serious about running the shard, and began reading “Taran’s Guide to Sphere Scripting”, a fairly well-written (better than any other documentation, anyway) guide to the Sphere scripting language, which was somewhat C-like (maybe Delphi is closer) and rather powerful despite Sphere’s quirks. This language is recursively enumerable, and thus probably qualifies for Turing completeness, surprisingly enough.

Within one month, I had mastered Taran’s guide. I would occasionally use it as a reference, but I would never rely upon it, or any other documentation, as learning material for the language again. My future training would come from running my shard, which began to grow, as well as visiting the Sphere Scripting Boards, where I fully intended to ask many questions, yet found myself answering instead.

And answering and answering, and scripting and scripting…

Within six months, I reached a ceiling of sorts: anything the server made it possible to do, I could do, no matter how impossible it may have seemed before I solved it. I knew the entire language (not trivial) by memory, and though I’d occasionally forget minor details, they’d always come back to me when I needed them. More importantly, I could construct scripts that many simply considered impossible with those tools, shaping the universe of my shard in highly novel ways. Despite this, I did not think of myself as a master of the craft until later: the true breakthrough moment came when I found myself fixing and extending scripts written by Swindler (considered one of the top three sphere scripters, along with Taran and Belgar). Fairly soon after that, my scripts began to outstrip theirs in both quantity and quality, even though I later learned that they had the advantage of seeing portions of the server’s source code.

Having finally contented myself with my mastery, I went back to answering people’s questions and improving my own shard, becoming one of the most prolific scripters as I wrote scripts for myself and others. Final Aegis became a moderately successful roleplaying shard, never able to accumulate a playerbase to compare with a player-versus-player (PvP) shard, but gathering a closely knit community nonetheless. The shard went down on September 29, 2004.

I just brought it back up today.