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Is the Universe its own Largest Computer?
missingmatterboy writes: "If the universe is simply a giant calculating machine, how big is it? Seth Lloyd, who two years ago worked out the theoretical maximum possible power a laptop computer could posess, has now "estimated how much information the Universe can contain, and how many calculations it has performed since the Big Bang." His conclusion: you'd need about 10^90 bits, with something like 10^120 manipulations of those bits, to express the universe since time began."
...42!
Infuriate left and right
I guess the fact we don't have weekly big-bangs indicates the universe doesn't run a certain OS out of Redmond :)
UNIX *is* user-friendly. Its just more selective on who its friends are. --Scott Adams
Like many of the other socially handicapped computer geeks here on slashdork, I was excited about this whole concept. The Universe as a giant computer is an extremely cool idea, IMO.
But then I reconsidered. After all, if the whole galactical starscape that spreads before us as we gaze into the night sky is in the end a really gigantor computer, then, well, the Athlon by my desk starts to look pretty puny.
All of a sudden, when faced with the sheer computatorial power represented by the glorious heavens above, things like "operating system," "information superhighway," and "porn" start to stop meaning so much.
In a world where we're all part of a gigantical computer, who gives a shooting starfuck about Linux?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
...if the universe has performed 10^120 operations and it's about 20 billion years old, it's running at about 4*10^90 gigahertz. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
That would explain too why evolution takes millions of year... though it would explain too why it simply works.
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
This is my sarcastic way of saying I don't understand what the $%^@! this guy is trying to sell us by saying the universe is a computer.
:-)
Support contracts ?
morcego
With calculating power like that, you /might/ be able to run Doom III at the highest settigs ;)
Colin Davis
2. ...the rapid expansion phase at the beginning was someone trying to overclock the universe?
3. ...the big crunch comes when MS figures out how to write software for the univsersal computer?
4. ... the CPU manufacturers are right around the corner to making a computer more powerful than universe.
5. ...all the weird stuff at the quantum scale is caused by dereferencing a NULL pointer.
Iaamoac
Exactly. And I wouldn't waste effort calculating the position of every single electron at every point in time either; I'd just wait until a measurement was taken on it and then compute where it should be. And depending on the formulas I used, this could confuse the simulated scientists in my universe, who would be wondering how electrons could pass through two slits simultaneously, but only when they weren't looking. Wait a minute...
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Cricket is a simplified version of baseball in which there are only two bases, but to confuse you the pitchers periodically change direction. Also, the bats are bigger because cricket players are fuelled by beer, and their coordination isn't so hot.
Relevance? well, this thread is about big numbers. And I think it was the Hungarian humorist George Mikes who said that the English, lacking a religion, invented cricket to give themselves an idea of eternity.
No, I confess, completely off topic.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Hmm, wonder what it will be able to calculate in 601 years...
Actually, in 600 years, there will 600 more years worth of calculations to do. Including the simulation in question. Ouch, that hurt.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
How many of us read this headline and thought, "YEAH! FORTY-TWO BABY!!! +5 Funny Karma, here I come! WOO!!!"
>click
D'oh.
Well, that all depends on which religion you believe in, of course.
The ancient Incans believed that it ran Solaris.
The christians, SonOS.
The scientologists reportedly believe it runs Xenux, but since their scriptures are secret, who can say?
Me, I think god was probably a true hippy, and it's running some flavor of BSD, but that's just my own opinion.
It's a good thing that the Universe wasn't written in C++. Otherwise, our friends would be able to access our private members.
Holy shit, this is exactly what I was telling my friend a few months ago, but he didn't understand. It's essentially the same thing the article was saying, but I was saying it exactly like you were: If you're going to simulate all the fundamental particles in the Universe, you'd need at least that many to calculate it in real-time. And to calculate it faster than real-time (predict the future) you'd need more fundamental particles than the entire system (the universe). I know I just repeated everything you just said, I'm just excited that someone put it the exact same way I was thinking it.
Just to point out: even though I agree with you, and it seems pretty intuitive, the fact is I don't think I can really *prove* it, because there might be computational shortcuts.
The one other flaw in this is the quantum uncertainty effects. Even though I don't understand quantum mechanics, and have not integrated it into my thought process, hence the above conjecture, I still must concede that it is true, because, apparently it's been proven many many times, and is well grounded. Taking that into account, isn't there at a certain level of the universe, things which can't be calculated and are purely left to chance (non-deterministic)? According to quantum mechanics, God *does* play dice with the universe, and that, by definition, cannot be calculated.