Hi,
The Perfectly Smooth Elephant (whose weight may be neglected but whose gravitas certainly cannot) has submited a proposal for government funding to construct a Working Model of the Universe
See:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=50&threadid=1971863&enterthread=y
for more informationabout this Elephant.
I'm a bit suspicious about this idea, so I thought I'd find out what you experts think:
Proposal: to construct a Working Model of the Universe. This is possibly not as difficult as you might think. Just code up the laws of physics and the software is complette. OK, OK, loading up the initial data may prove a tad time consuming; but we could always solve that by going back to the big bang when the universe consisted of a point mass.
Anyway.. once you have it running it works like this:
Given a sufficiently fast CPU the model will run faster than real time. Lets assume it runs at twice real time: if not just make the CPU faster and faster until it does. So after 1 sec you look at the state of the universe in the model and you notice (as expected) that it holds the state as of 2 secs. But the model itself is contained in the universe, so this model contains its own state at time 2secs, which of course represents the state of the universe at time 4secs, which in turn conains the model at time 4secs, which...
This process continues indefinately so in fact the model within the model within the model shows the state of the universe at time 2*n and n is arbitrarily large.
So the model is in effect indefinately fast, so it must work with any CPU however slow, indeed stricly speaking without any CPU at all.
Very cheap then...
P. S. Elephant
Can this be right?
Peter
The Perfectly Smooth Elephant (whose weight may be neglected but whose gravitas certainly cannot) has submited a proposal for government funding to construct a Working Model of the Universe
See:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=50&threadid=1971863&enterthread=y
for more informationabout this Elephant.
I'm a bit suspicious about this idea, so I thought I'd find out what you experts think:
Proposal: to construct a Working Model of the Universe. This is possibly not as difficult as you might think. Just code up the laws of physics and the software is complette. OK, OK, loading up the initial data may prove a tad time consuming; but we could always solve that by going back to the big bang when the universe consisted of a point mass.
Anyway.. once you have it running it works like this:
Given a sufficiently fast CPU the model will run faster than real time. Lets assume it runs at twice real time: if not just make the CPU faster and faster until it does. So after 1 sec you look at the state of the universe in the model and you notice (as expected) that it holds the state as of 2 secs. But the model itself is contained in the universe, so this model contains its own state at time 2secs, which of course represents the state of the universe at time 4secs, which in turn conains the model at time 4secs, which...
This process continues indefinately so in fact the model within the model within the model shows the state of the universe at time 2*n and n is arbitrarily large.
So the model is in effect indefinately fast, so it must work with any CPU however slow, indeed stricly speaking without any CPU at all.
Very cheap then...
P. S. Elephant
Can this be right?
Peter