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Living Earth Simulator Aims To Simulate Everything
H3xx writes "An international group of scientists is aiming to create a simulator — nicknamed The Living Earth Simulator — that will collect data from billions of sources and use it to replicate everything happening on Earth, from global weather patterns and the spread of diseases to international financial transactions or congestion on highways. The project aims to advance the scientific understanding of what is taking place on the planet, encapsulating the human actions that shape societies and the environmental forces that define the physical world. Perhaps this is Asimov's concept of Psychohistory come to fruition."
Will the lab mice still study us?
not enough data!!
he who controls the spice controls the universe
It is controlled by a bunch of mice?
IIRC wasn't the name of the computer WOPR?
simulating everything?
Somehow I doubt that all the computing machines in the word combined have the necessary processing power to computationally simulate *everything* that happens on the planet, even when if we try to limit the variables. So I'll just go ahead and assume the science team will compromise on a flawed model which produces equally flawed results.
I'm guessing they end up simply computing Pi.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
The term 'yeah, right' comes to mind.
Starting from a few semi-structured sources of data, they expect to come up with a simulation of how everything affects everything else? Starting from a belief that Google Maps, data.gov.uk and Wikipedia are 'real-time data sources' they will:
1. Collect all sorts of data real-time, including sensitive personal data like medical healthcare records
2. 'create a framework to turn that morass of data in to models that accurately replicate what is taken place on Earth today'
3. ???
4. Profit
Either they have excessively high expectations of the Semantic Web ('While the LES will need to be able to assimilate vast oceans of data it will simultaneously have to understand what that data means. Semantic web technology will encode a description of data alongside the data itself, enabling computers to understand the data in context.') or the designers of this thing have been egregiously misquoted by the news media.
The Semantic Web (to the extent that anybody has made it work at all) does not generalise very well - 'understanding' the data, no matter how it is encoded, requires a lot of background knowledge about the domain. Within specific usage domains that is often achievable. Across domains it is very problematic.
In the Science Fiction novel Simulacron-3, published in 1964, Daniel Francis Galyoue describes a huge analog electronic computer designed to simulate the world for modelling social, psychological, commercial, and political processes.
The BBC article mentions gathering googlean amounts of data and vast computing resources, but not really what to do with them.
or would it be Third Life? Maybe it'll name itself.
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
Is it not getting increasingly obvious that we ourselves are living in a simulation and that it is actually the year 1 million and a half? That blatant clue's have been cast in the sky; the most obvious being the same apparent magnitude of our primary satalite and that which we satalite? That once in the know the keyboard is plainly all around us merely plastered with posters of sensible looking people saying 'Do not press the buttons!' and wild eye'd colourful strange men who smile, 'Hack away!'? Madness surely; but keep turning reality inside out Mankind and I assure you this is will become the dominant suspicion that will unsettle us to the end of time. Like the bearded dragon shall we tap our nose against the glass until perhaps our owner takes us out of our tank to play in the garden before returning us once we realise the eternal truth that it is infact... cold outside.
They could save themselves a lot of work and just get Dwarf Fortress...
I am not sure if having everything in a single model is a good approach. Certainly seems too computationally expensive.
I would much prefer if people start looking into socio-economic modeling. We now have pretty good climatic models, and this started in the 50s, when there computers had almost no power. Now we have such power, and we could feasibly simulate social (i and economic behavior of whole country on a home PC.
We could start like this: Each person in simulation would have possible actions (these would be predefined), and decide on which action to use based on habit, previous experience and copying from friends of its social network. Actions could range from economic (produce something of value) through social (meet someone) to political (enter contract with someone).
Not only will this project not end well, it won't ever end, period. Prerequisite: read the prologue to Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. In summary: We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.
Just buy a copy of sims 3 and be done with it.
I hope they've put some deep thought into this....
Program Intellivision!
Suppose you start the simulator, and it veers off. You'll want some kind of corrector mechanism, no? So you get some feedback from the real world. The trouble is, if you don't have a plausible model of how "eveything" works, you end up having to correct an awful lot.
Also, isn't the only way to calculate something so complex as "everything on Earth" to uhm, have an Earth to run? And isn't the point of modelling to look at a small part of the whole, to abstract the bits you're interested in? I wonder if this project is going to be tell us anything other than "there's a lot of complexity of there, dude".
Name it Matrix.
maybe they can simulate the next major discoveries we will make too?
The only reason for simulating earth and all of its inhabitants and interactions, is to see what would happen if factor X + Y and introduced into the mix and factor Z removed. Or any combination of those.
...now what can we do so we're immune to all of this and any blowback?
I bet they will have hundreds of top sociologists and anthropologists on hand to lend their "expertise" to figure what they can or cannot get away with by manipulating the outcomes of this simulation until they get what they want.
What happens when all money is gone?
What happens when all food is removed?
What happens when there is world war 3?
What happens when people revold?
Sure, they'll release some research paper on how genocides spread, or how animals migrate from one place to another, etc... but having a "toy" like this would prove to be a loss if you really didn't use it to its full use.
If you don't agree with what I say, just keep in mind this is already happening. You don't think governments and people in power have social engineers that crunch numbers and process data to determine all the possible outcomes of something like going to war in Iraq? You think they didn't have 500-page reports on the possible riots that would take place all around the world, the money lost, gained, lives saved, lost, etc.. etc..
Now imagine all those resources pooled into this one tool, do you REALLY think it's going to be used to determine when the next eclipse is going to be or the gas price of hot dogs in 5 years? I think not.
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
who tried that was killed by his friend's user...
because they will have to simulate their own system that is simulating Earth, on which there's a system simulating Earth...
Wake me when they can accurately predict yesterday's situation with just the data from up to 3 days ago for more than 1 month in a row.
I did horrible horrible things to the people in that game - swimming pools with no ladders to get out of, setting off fireworks inside so that they burned to death, shutting them in a 1x1 square of walls so that they had so sleep in their own urine as they starved to death... I can't imagine that this would be any different. If I had a global simulator, after I'd done any real work I'd start seeing how many different ways I could cause the world to burn.
Does this make me a bad person? =P
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
When we do build the matrix thorazine could be used as currency
Yes but is the simulator written in BASIC?
matrix simulacron-3 weltamdraht thirteenthfloor
Run the simulation in reverse and we should be able to take a look at the past, no?
Things that came to mind:
1. It will show us what a lot of us already know, we're fucking up the place.
2. It would be more sufficient to actually do sth. about stopping stuffing up the place instead of thinking about stopping the stuffing up and collecting data about what we are actually stuffing up so we can stop stuffing up the place.
3. make a cup of tea and have a minced pie, after all its xmas.
to code or not to code, that is the question.
Weather is a chaotic system, and weather affects living things in very significant ways. I'm sure there are plenty of other chaotic non-linearities in what they're trying to simulate as well.
Doesn't such instability doom any world simulator to crappy fidelity?
Psycho Killer
Qu'est-ce que c'est
fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa
Run Run Run Run Run Run Run Run Away
Oh Oh Oh
Ay Ay Ay Ay Ay Wooooo
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
why is this not tagged matrix?
Clearly this is an attempt to invoke Laplace's Demon.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Any sufficiently accurate simulation is indistinguishable from reality. Corollary: Any simulation distinguishable from reality is insufficiently accurate. Phil P
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Somehow I doubt that all the computing machines in the word combined have the necessary processing power to computationally simulate *everything* that happens on the planet, even when if we try to limit the variables. So I'll just go ahead and assume the science team will compromise on a flawed model which produces equally flawed results.
Every model is flawed according to that definition.
They'll try to simplify the earth, and model it... and hopefully it can predict future events with a certain degree of certainty.
I agree that the word "everything" is too strong... but it's just sad and silly that the entire Slashdot forum attacks these guys because they said this.
There is some value in this exercise. Just like you can model an ant colony, you can probably model the world. We're all awfully predictable anyway.
Isn't the earth a simulation created by mice anyway.
Or did I missunderstand Douglas Adams.
Will the simulation completely model the effects of the Living Earth computer itself on the Earth? That is to say, will it contain a complete Living Earth Simulator simulator ?
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Everything ? Including myself ? Will I be able to meet myself then ?
... Linux ?
Understanding -> New Predictions -> Changed Behavior -> Failed Predictions
To take an easy example, they mention the economy and financial markets. If we achieve greater understanding and greater predictive power, we will alter our behavior in the markets, thus leading to a different outcome. This goes for any area in which it is our behavior creating the data that we are using to gain understanding, where that understanding will also impact our behavior.
Dude! It's like "Super Grand Theft Auto"!!!
I think that it is very important we will start the campaign against killing the baby seals in the simulated environment. If we all start boycotting LES products, maybe we can all make simulation a better place for cute, furry animals.
that I am having sex right now? Oh yeah oh yeah
How do we know we are not already living in one of these things? If so, this seems a bit redundant . . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche,_New_York
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The simulation is a European project, part of the FuturICT-programme, a part of the European Union research framework programme.
It intends to unify hundreds of the best scientists in Europe in a 10 year 1 billion EUR program to explore social life on earth and everything it relates to. The FuturICT flagship will produce historic breakthroughs and provide powerful new ways to manage challenges that make the modern world so difficult to predict, including the financial crisis.
The FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator is a previously unseen multidisciplinary international scientific endeavour with focus on techno-socio-economic-environmental systems. The three main achievements of the FuturICT flagship will be the establishment of
- a Living Earth Simulator (global-scale simulation of techno-socio-economic systems),
- Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, scarcity of resources, emerging risks and conflicts, epidemics, etc.), and
- an Innovation Accelerator (identifying innovations early on, evaluating them across disciplines and supporting co-creation projects between different scientific disciplines, business, and governance).
Just simulate every single atom etc? That should do it.
Citation:
Feeling Good - David D. Burns, M.D.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
... Like to play a game?
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
Does this mean that the Living Earth Simulator will attempt to simulate itself? malloc(): error: recursive call
Are our super computers even capable of doing the calculations for, well, everything on earth?
I'm going to say, no.
You'd have to do too many shortcuts to get accurate results, let alone we don't know how most the crap works in this world anyways. Sure, we know some, and learn more, but enough to simulate it?
I'm going to put this up there with Duke Nuke'm coming out before 2010 is over.
Be seeing you...
contact to see if formed his own survival prospects the top. Or were, and some of the b7efore playing to
What's the matter kiddo? 4chan been laughing at ya again, and your little sister done locked you in the boot?
So this seal walks into a club...
Take your example with financial markets. L.E.S. predicts that Company XYZ is going to bankrupt/it's stock become worthless. Everybody listening L.E.S.stop to lend money to XYZ/call in debts/sell stocks as soon as possible. Stock price plummets, company has blocked cashflows because of creditors not trusting it, bankrupt.
What you say would be true if prediction of the market would lead people to extend forces balancing the scale in opposite direction. For the many cases I know about, opposite is quite true - if you know about something, actions you take to make profit out of it help it becoming true. Same thing could be extended to other things - like military. If L.E.S.predicts increased tension at certain point of the border between North and South, guess, where they will deploy the extra troops?
I think that traffic jams are better example. If people are trusting L.E.S., traffic jam won't form in the predicted place. And here, you need to pull out rule number two - there are enough people in the world who are thinking they are smarter than L.E.S.... You don't really need a predictive power in such machine. You need to convince important people it has predictive capabilities and for many aspects, job is done - as long as you output reasonably possible predictions, they will come true.
The rules can be bent, and some, broken...
There's already software like that. It's called Dwarf Fortress.
In order to achieve an accurate simulation, we'd have to know all of the different species of, well, everything on this planet. Like one of the posts above, not only do we not have the computational power to handle all of the random things that happen on earth, but I doubt we have enough scientists on the project who have the time to add the data required. Keep in mind that if they want to have a chance at a realistic simulation, they would undoubtedly need to add genetic code to the system. It would have to account for genetic variation for every new generation of EVERY species on the planet. We could literally predict the potential evolution of the planet by fast forwarding everything at that point. A great idea in theory, but so is peace on earth, or colonizing mars, or hell, even recycling. Suppose it's worth a shot. I guess these scientists were pretty upset with how badly SPORE ended up being.
His sister's boot is on her foot...
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Starting from such farcical first assumptions, its hard to believe this stupid idea is going to get funding, much less even conceivably work.
Look: every "sim" rationalizes inputs, creates a facade of activity that looks like real life, so as to produce reasonably realistic outputs. The point of modeling is to EXCLUDE as many variables as you can, to make what you're studying as simple as possible, to try to draw it down to its essentials.
To build a true sim, you have to start at the "lowest protocols" that input your system. Given that they want to sim the entire world, you're talking about starting with an engine that comprehensively models the physics and chemical processes that create the earth. (And that's assuming that you can safely take solar input as a given, and assume that your 'isolated' environment is the Earth, not entirely a safe assumption when you start considering the impact on solar variability to Earth weather, lunar gravity on tides, etc.) As I understand, we *don't* even have a good understanding of those very basic systems such as what actually is at the core of our planet, or the intricacies of plate tectonics, etc. (Note: once you can do this, I'm sure all those scientists already working their whole lives to model the 'simple' basics of planetary physics and volcanoes would love a copy of the sim to that point.) So we'd have to rationalize the up-feed in the sim from that lowest protocol - already, at the very basic levels, we're essentially guessing at inputs, not simming them. Whups.
'Above' geophysical processes, there's the physical processes of water, weather, etc. that produce the topology of the surface of the world (or do you think that geography, climate, weather, etc. don't play a part in individual or collective choices?); only once you have that simmed properly can you then even START to model the biosphere. Once you model the biosphere comprehensively, you can start to model people in it, and then you're faced with the comprehensive issues of psychology, free will, collective behaviors, human perversity. Finally, once you have this robust giant model, then you can finally start simming the meta systems atop human society - economics, social welfare, etc.
This is not Asimov, and this goofball is no Hari Seldon. He's talking about the 'critical importance' of simulating (and getting useful results from) the omega step in this project, when we can't even manage the alpha. That's farce. One might as well start a project analyzing the economics of interstellar trade, because the results are probably going to be useful long before this project produces anything of value. (But I'm pretty certain it'll be spending piles of $$ well before that, right?)
"Regardless of the challenges the project faces, the greater danger is not attempting to use the computer tools we have now - and will have in future - to improve our understanding of global socio-economic trends, says Dr Helbing." ...Should read instead as "Regardless of the challenges the project faces, the greater danger is not attempting to use the computer tools we have now - and will have in future - to try to gather some funding for an open ended and unachievable research project," says Dr Helbing, "This nonsense could keep me in BMW's, first-class airline seats, and symposia in cool locations for the rest of my life."
-Styopa
So does Civ V. So does my globe. Anything can be used to simulate anything else poorly. Nothing can be used to simulate everything else exactly. The quality of the output will be determined by the areas they focus, the choices made when they write the algorithms and the data they get to put into the system. 'We're simulating the whole world and how it interacts' provides little information about the quality or usefulness of the simulation.
there's a toe-jam joke there somewhere...
Outer Limits Season 2 Episode 8 "Wolf 359" http://www.tvrage.com/The_Outer_Limits_1963/episodes/200967 You've been warned. ;)
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
I can't imagine anyone is expecting this to accurately predict the future. To me, the interesting thing will be seeing how the simulation fails, despite the fact that we input the totality of our knowledge.
Not even close.
Psychohistory had nothing to do with simulating things on a computer. It was a mathematical construct to predict human behavior in groups, in the same way that you can predict what a large enough group of atoms will do even if you can't know what any one atom will be doing at any given time.
This is more like a Matrix 0.001 alpha. I imagine their Neo being a little piece of CoreWars code.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
I want a simcity like game with a custom road system Simcity 4 + plugs ins is nice but old and buggy.
Citys xl lacked the custom road systems and the highway interchanges are to big and just have roundabouts.
Good luck with that... trying simulate *everything*? So will they try to simulate the existance of a machine that is simulating everything in the system? Of course, then, they'll have to be simulating a machine that is simulating a machine. Repeat as necessary (that is, infinitely).
But I'm sure they've already written algorithms to simulate the hype and press that will be generated by grandiose science schemes.
'How could you possibly think typing "import skynet" was a good idea?' (it's the mouseover)
Not even close. Possibly a matrix, but, there is no spoon.
Will they take into account their own simulation, will they a simulate the simulation on the simulation and the the simulation simulated on the simulation on the simulation.... turtles all the way down style?
Yes Mr. Smith, it started in 2010.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
The human arrogance of thinking we as a species are capable of knowing everything, machine assisted or otherwise, is the source of many of the most serious mistakes we have made. Everything from the introduction of insects from other countries to control our pests (and having the introduced species run wild) to plans to fertilize the oceans to address global warming -- arrogance, the root of much of the worlds bad deeds.
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
In a related news story, a group of scientists have formed a company named Magrathea with long term plans of building a massive planet which will be capable of fostering the design and manufacture of custom luxury planets.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Perhaps a revival of the Universe Simulation Mailing List? Unfortunately, the archives were on Geocities, so even that bit may be long gone since archive.org is throwing an error when I try to pull it up.
The big problem with this is that most of the world's and humanity's interesting systems are chaotic. You may get lucky and find an attractor or two.
In any case, simulation can show you plausible futures, but they'll have no predictive value. The outputs will be little more than cybernetic speculative fiction.
On the other hand, there's no explaining chaos to a politician, or to a scientist who believes that more data and higher resolution are all that's needed to clear up the confusion; the grant money will keep flowing.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
I am not a physicist but wouldn't a *lossless* simulation of everything down to the subatomic level require a simulator that is equally as large if not larger than the thing it is simulating? I mean every bit of memory does take real world space to store whether it is a magnetic domain on a disk platter or an electron in a stick of ram. To store data on a computer about a particle you need to use other particles.
I think this is one thing many people seem to forget. You can't store an entire worlds worth of information on a 3.5" disk without some loss of data, there are physical laws that need to be obeyed.
... we are nothing more than a simulation created by some super alien CS student as a senior project this should be interesting. It also has implications as to whether our universe will die slowly due to entropy buildup (a memory leak in the simulation) or in some cataclysmic, world ending event (when the simulation is ported to VB.Net and crashes).
Have gnu, will travel.
Does the Living Earth Simulator contain the Living Earth Simulator? And then does that one as well, like a Russian Mandelbrot doll.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I agree with you in general about the limits of simulations and even intelligence itself.
Still, simulations can be used to: :-);
* predict (you are right, they often fail for reasons of chaos theory and limited accuracy or missing aspects);
* understand (where you play what ifs to see the consequences of your assumptions);
* to gain insight (something other than understanding of details, where you gain a sense of the gestalt, a feeling, or some new summarizing key idea, like I say with my sig about the irony of the tools of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity -- maybe we need a simulation about creating simulations to have scientists gain the insight about simulations you suggest many lack?
* assess risk (to some extend, by Monte Carlo methods for well understood processes)
* to consolidate knowledge in an organized explicit way (you can't hand wave as much when you have to implement ideas in code);
* educate intellectually (as fun toys to play with and learn from);
* educate practically (to learn skills by trial and error, basically failing faster and safer like in a flight simulator or nuclear power plant simulator or surgical simulator);
* educate emotionally (to see consequences and possibilities and related narrative, often as games);
* entertain (relates to the above, but is a different focus);
* to serve as a focus for political policy debates about future scenarios (including as different simulators with different assumptions describe different implications of policy -- note weather forecasters use multiple weather models plus their intuition and experience to make forecasts);
* as a form of self-justifying artwork;
* as a way to create entirely new worlds to explore inspired by nature but (as you suggest) often very different;
* probably many more -- in the sense of, what good is a blank sheet of paper?
I learned some of this from thinking about what people like Steven C Bankes at RAND had to say in the 1980s and 1990s:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/b/bankes_steven_c.html
As well as people like Seymour Papert (of Microworlds educational software fame).
http://www.papert.org/
Or Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and others with Smalltalk as a simulation environment. As well as what futurists (WFS) and risk modellers (RAMAS) have to say. And from making a simulation about gardening in the 1990s (with my wife, as a more than six person-year labor of love released with source under the GPL):
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
One concern I have about simulations of living creatures (especially intelligent or self-aware ones that can feel some kind of virtual pleasure or virtual pain, like in agent-based simulations) is, what are the ethics? As in, do not do unto others that which you do not want done unto yourself (unless they like that kind of stuff)...
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/LegalRightsOfRobots.htm
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The first foundation novel was published in 1951
chillax137
I'll get excited about this when it's time to stimulate me.
This sounds more like an effort to bamboozle politicians into funding supercomputer centers. Anyone remotely familiar with numerical analysis and combinatorics would recognize that this is a fool's errand for two fundamental reasons. 1) the nature of much data lies at the boundary where systems become chaotic and consequently solutions to such datasets will be ill posed and have high condition numbers, where even minute differences in coefficients, that will likely result from just shear volume of computations on of finite computer architecture will render results meaningless. Secondly, there are a great many important problems, such as the elucidation of phylogenies necessary to explain biological diversity that are NP complete and hence computationally intractable no matter what the speed of the supercomputer. The number of potential answers to such problems increases faster than the ability of any processor to compute them. Even for small taxonomic groups the number of possible phylogenies that must be considered dwarfs the number of electrons in the known universe.
Nonetheless, the overall idea could serve as a useful paradigm for organizing scientific infrastructures and its computational components and availability of adequate computational resources for science, so long as the project does not try to shoehorn all scientific investigation into the constraints of some poorly conceived form of universal budgeting. If not, the project could actually do far more harm than good. These guys need to go back to the drawing board and be more specific about exactly what it is they want to compute and why. Lets face it humanity has huge challenges and only finite resources with which to address them, both in material and human resource terms. Unless, there is some potentially successful strategy for dealing with them, we are all up ___creek without a paddle.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1927208&cid=34689212
Hmmmm? Did Your big mouth and skimming got you into a jam again?? Absolutely. Too easy.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1927208&cid=34689212
Hmmmm? Did Your big mouth and skimming get you into a jam again?? Absolutely. You burned yourself fool.
They only have to go outside to see the real thing....sheesh
reminds me of this Jorge Luis Borges story (here it is in its entirety):
"On Exactitude in Science . . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658"
From Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, Translated by Andrew Hurley Copyright Penguin 1999 .
I actually submitted a suggestion very similar to this to Google's 10^100 contest. I'm glad to hear that it's apparently being attempted, despite being shunned by Google.
if we are already living in a simulation, I hope the one being built from this collective of intelligence, will correct the flaws :)
...taste like chicken.
You know whom to ask. Your query will lead you to
this page.
I hope no person in this simulated world becomes The One, gets out of there and kick our asses.
Can it lead me to a major lottery win? If not, how useful is it to me?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I never could figure out why Brits call their car's trunk* a "boot". A car's trunk is decended from the buggy, with its hinged box (a trunk) sitting on the back.
Why "boot"? It makes no sense.
* link randomly chosen from Google
Free Martian Whores!
would like to see the simulation simulating me, right here, right now.
We already know the outcome.
7|-|47 !5 50 x3\/\/1 \/\/|-|3|\| ! 54\/\/ 7|-|47 !|\| |\|3\/\/ 5(!3|\|7!57 ! 707411J 1013|) !7 |3|_|7 7|-|3|\| ! 7|-|0|_|6|-|7 4|30|_|7 !7 ! 570|*|*3 101!|\|6 4|\||) 7|-|0|_|6|-|7 Jx 7|-|!5 (0|_|1|) |33 50 (001
It's 42, of course!
The answer is 42 :)
Very clever, but it's simulations all the way down!
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1927208&cid=34689212
Hmmmm? Did Your big mouth and skimming get you into a jam again?? Absolutely. You tried taking on your betters, and your skimming and your stupidity did you in, promptly. How embarassing for you clone. It was totally hilarious watching you run away! There will be NO burying this clone, for your trolling others here repeatedly, and under your other registered username here too of clone53421 (1310749) too.
This reminded me of this story. http://qntm.org/responsibility
What the HECK are you talking about? Seriously?
I think you have me confused for someone else... I haven’t modded any of your posts recently (that I can remember), much less with multiple usernames... in fact I just checked your recent post history and I don’t see any that were moderated at all so I’m really not sure what you’re talking about here.
Note: I am not the AC poster.
Well that much I know: I know exactly who the AC poster is. He’s Alexander Peter Kowalski, goes by his initials (apk), is a rabid evangelist for hosts-file based malware-blocking, posts at the slightest provocation pages and pages of copypasta that he’s apparently generated, wrote some horrid-looking shareware some years ago, and has been trolling the interwebz for something like the past 15-20 years. Seriously, google his name, and you’ll pretty quickly see how credible he is.
As far as his off-topic replies, he’s recently been stalking me because I contradicted him here (and I really wasn’t the AC guy posting shell scripts in that thread, though apk was thoroughly convinced I must be). If you knew apk, you’d probably be familiar with this tactic (he’s also been stalking metrix007, and a few more users I think, though I can’t remember them off the top of my head).
Me, on the other hand, I generally try to get along with anyone who isn’t a complete loon or an idiot (i.e. apk), so maybe we got off on the wrong foot. And I can’t fathom what on earth in my post about a “stopped clock” was rude. It certainly wasn’t intended to be, although I did misunderstand your post before it.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1927208&cid=34689212
Hmmmm? Did Your big mouth and skimming get you into a jam again?? Absolutely. You tried taking on your betters, and your skimming and your stupidity did you in, promptly. How embarassing for you clone. It was totally hilarious watching you run away! There will be NO burying this clone, for your trolling others here repeatedly, and under your other registered username here too of clone53421 (1310749) as well.
It turns out he is a fairly well known developer. It just seems you are just posting here to try to troll him, and from your posting history it seems he got the best of you here http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1927208&cid=34689212 and you are just angry about it. It's not his fault you skimmed like a dolt and look stupid. I also see you use more than 1 registered account here clone (clone53421) also. Why is that?
I think you have me confused for someone else...
You are correct, I am not. I apologise, unreservedly, though, fat lot of good that'll do.
I confused you with someone who's attacking and stalking someone else (my wife), having just posted politely to them asking for a reason - I jumped to the conclusion that what was happening to her was happening to me. Nothing to do with your posts, or this thread.
I just checked your recent post history and I don’t see any that were moderated at all so I’m really not sure what you’re talking about here.
Effectively, no. The message (twice about same post in the same day) something to the effect of "your post x has been moderated down, the moderation has been removed , possibly due to a moderator post in the same thread". Not this thread.
Note: I am not the AC poster.
Well that much I know: I know exactly who the AC poster is. He’s Alexander Peter Kowalski,
Now there's a coincidence. I didn't recognise him/it. But I sure do know of him - the 14MB host file, self-validating, hello from 1990 troll! Normally (if that word even applies in this instance) he puts "APK" in his posts/malodorous missives. I reported him for abuse in another thread yesterday - something I've never done before.
Me, on the other hand, I generally try to get along with anyone who isn’t a complete loon or an idiot (i.e. apk), so maybe we got off on the wrong foot. And I can’t fathom what on earth in my post about a “stopped clock” was rude. It certainly wasn’t intended to be, although I did misunderstand your post before it.
Nothing you wrote was taken as rude, the "No shit Sherlock" (colloquial jocularism) was the only comment aimed at you. The rest was me stupidly using and external editor to compose, not checking before posting, and, my stupidity.
You mis-read my post, and I fucked up my response. The two things don't equate. Mea culpa, and kudos for your reasonable and polite response. Good luck with the unreasonable, intractable, abusive, and recalcitrant APK.