Slashdot Mirror
Simulated Universe
anonymous lion writes "A story in the Guardian Unlimited reports on The Millennium Simulation saying that it is 'the biggest exercise of its kind'. It required 25 million megabytes of memory to take our universe's initial conditions along with the known laws of physics to create this simulated universe." From the article: "The simulated universe represents a cube of creation with sides that measure 2bn light years. It is home to 20m galaxies, large and small. It has been designed to answer questions about the past, but it offers the tantalising opportunity to fast-forward in time to the slow death of the galaxies, billions of years from now."
Just type "FUND" a few hundred times.
Do it before you build anything, because it causes earthquakes.
there's more than one way to do me.
I'm pretty sure that they're talking about RAM. And yes, 23 terrabytes of RAM is a ton.
What if we're in a simulated universe, simulating other universes?
Whoaaa.
Pass the bong, dude.
I always though that a computer large enough to handle a simulation of the universe would allow us to predict the future, even at individual level if the simulation was advanced enough.
And then I realized that the smallest simulation of the universe would probably be the size of the universe.
It got very confusing at that point.
No, they don't. This has happened a few times in the past, e.g., when they didn't know about the different populations of stars, but currently there isn't an age problem.
We don't know what dark matter is, but we know enough about its gravitational properties -- that's why it was postulated to exist, after all -- to simulate its effects on these scales.
The models we have are not as badly flawed as you think they are. But even if they are flawed, that's the point of the simulation: to test the validity of the model. If the simulation's results don't agree with observations, then that tells us about where the model fails.