Saturday was an interesting day. I had plans to do a lot of game development, but I decided I'd at least jump in on Saturday's V.O.T.U. podcast as that is usually entertaining to be part of. @sirlunchthehost and @beanz do a good job of putting the final videos together and the process of verbally chatting with fellow steemians is pretty enjoyable.

I've stated for a long time that one of the things that could lure me away from the written word and into the world of headphones and microphones was a chance to chat with @fyrstikken as he has often had me laughing as a spectator from the side, but we never actually had ever spoken. Well he ended up being one of the guests, so that has since occurred.

Everything went pretty normal... until the end. In the end when the interview was over and they unmuted everyone we started talking about many things. @sirlunchthehost had stepped away for something and the rest of us had gone nuts. When he came back we were deep in discussion about the prison industrial complex, the 13th amendment and slavery. He kind of showed up having missed all of the build up and did mention it was an uncomfortable topic for him and said that we could all move it over to SteemSpeak. We were not opposed to doing this, we just had already built up conversational momentum and he eventually signed out and we kept talking about it for a bit.

Yet, it didn't stop there we spoke about many topics. A discussion about Witnesses got particularly heated at one moment as one person thought the idea of breaking the role of witnesses into two types of people A) the people who vote on changes and hard forks, and B) he thought all the decentralized block verification should be outsourced to an entity that had no affiliation with steem/steemit.

He actually is pretty eloquent in his speech but, at one point he had one of those "foot in mouth" moments that all of us have from time to time (easier to avoid when you're not speaking, easy to condemn when just listening) and I winced. I had the phrase "uh oh" flash through my mind. Sure enough... @fyrstikken is unleashed, it was passionate, it was well reasoned, etc. It was a force of nature you needed to let run its course. As it did I said a few things, the other guy said a few things and we were all happy and a steemian family again.

Eventually we decided to move over to SteemSpeak and @fyrstikken told me he was going to make me a moderator there as I'd just proven I was quite good at it. I appreciated the compliment, and when I am on there I will try to help people however I can with building bridges between different view points, as that is all I really did. I do tend to prefer the written word to the spoken, though I will commit to jumping into SteemSpeak and V.OT.U. still in the future. I imagine I will do so several times a week, but it is a pretty huge distraction for me from my other projects. I don't tend to accomplish much when I am listening to people speaking, and even less if I am speaking.

There is also another disadvantage... A minefield that can exist in verbal communication was exposed once we were on Steem Speak.

Verbal is not always as easy

Somehow a few of us started talking about Religion, but we mentioned the concept of Reality as a Simulation. This simulation hypothesis is one that has grown traction during this decade, and some of us have talked about it a bit long before that.

The problem arose when one person proceeded to state that the problem was with infinity. It was infinity he thought that blew the entire simulation theory up. I told him I knew a solution to that. This infuriated him. He proceeded to talk about PI and the infinite digits of PI, he proceeded to tell me what I couldn't do. Yet anytime I tried to open my mouth to explain how it could be done, he would proceed to repeat some variation on telling me what I couldn't do. He literally would not let anyone speak while he kept repeating essentially the same statements phrased with slightly different word arrangements.

This is an example of why I like the written word. He could have told me in a written comment what I can't do. I then could have given him a lengthy reply which he might actually take the time to read.

This does not work in a spoken format. Eventually, I did something uncharacteristic for me and it went something along the lines of "You are so busy repeatedly telling all of us what we can't do why don't you shut the fuck up for at least long enough for us to answer, and then you can continue" I also mentioned at that moment that this was not normal from me. It did silence him. Sadly, he muted himself and then logged out.

I said... "That's really too bad as I did have an answer for him" as this is a concept I have thought about a lot. In fact I have written a steemit post before about simulation hypothesis and infinity.

At this point several people including @fyrstikken asked me to speak about it anyway as they were interested. So I did.

I don't remember exactly what I stated, but I told them that the only thing really setting any infinity related limits on a computer is the memory amount. Yet the potential for that is so vast we'd likely not know there was a point of failure.

I explained that a floating point number is typically 4 bytes used to represent the number and where accuracy fails is due to the storage limits of those bytes. I told them that this was constructed though and CPUs, FPUs, and GPUs can process them rapidly, but if speed is not the issue we could literally construct much more massive numbers out of as many bytes as were available to us. This didn't even take into consideration quantum computing which other people mentioned.

Yet, even so procedural generation exactly does already imitate infinity and it is getting more and more detailed in games, and scientific simulations all of the time. We do have limitations in them, but that is typically due to tying them to floats, ints, or some fixed byte sized format for storing numbers. We do not have to do this.

I mentioned minecraft. That is procedurally generated near infinite worlds. It creates them based on mathematical formulas. All of that procedural information is stored in those formulas and depends simply on coordinates and a seed value. You can theoretically run to the edge of a minecraft world where strange larger block occurrences would happen. People have tried to do it and it takes vast amounts of time... many real life days of running endlessly non-stop in one direction. I don't recall how long, I just know it is a long time. It may even be weeks. This is based off of 4 byte numbers.

Going deep and technical here - this was not in the chat

My current computer I am using has 16 Gigbytes of RAM, that does not count if I use paging to a RAM DISK type situation then I have 6 Terabytes or so of memory beyond that.

Using 4 byte numbers Minecrafts procedural routine can produce seemingly infinite worlds that could take weeks to reach the edge of the world where the detail in those numbers starts to be insufficient.

Let's put this into more scope and yes this is technical. A byte is 8 bits (in modern computers) with each bit being capable of being 0 or 1. You can represent numbers in powers of 2 by turning on or off those numbers. Normal people work in base 10 numbers where each digit is 0-9. When you get more than 9 then you put a 1 in the TENS spot and a 0 in the ONES spot. When you get more than 99 you put a 1 in the HUNDREDS spot, etc. This is base 10. Computers do the same thing with numbers but it is all powers of 2.

10 in Binary would actually be the value 2.
100 in Binary would be the value 4.
111 in Binary would be the value 7.

So with 8 bits (aka a byte) you can store the values 0-255. That is 256 different numerical values a single byte can store.

If you put two bytes together you can actually treat it like a Base 256 number.
(250) would be the value 250 (usually bytes are represented in hex in what are called nibbles, but I'm not going to do that here)
(1)(0) would be the value 256.
(1)(5) would be 256+5 = 261.

With two bytes (aka 16 bits) you could represent 0-65535 (65536 numbers)

This process repeats as you add bytes...
4,278,190,080
16,711,680
65,280
1

So a 4 byte number could store 0-4,294,967,041 (or over 4 billion numbers)

Do you see how as you add bytes the numerical possibilities expand exponentially?

That is only 4 bytes. Usually in the computer they don't store quite that much as if they are a signed number such as an integer it will use one of the bits to indicate whether the number is positive of negative.

If it is floating point it'll use a byte or in some cases some bits to specify the location of the decimal point. This is why it is called a FLOATING POINT as where that decimal point is in the number can move around.

There are numbers in math libraries that in some cases will use 8 bytes. You can make a really large number with that.

What about my RAM though? I currently have 16 gigabyes of RAM. I could write a program that would use most of those bytes to store a number. Do you understand how truly staggering that number would be in size? To us humans it would effectively seem like infinity before we ever got very far in that.

In fact I'd bet that using a less than 1K of memory to store the digits of a number there is a good chance we could store the largest number we've ever seen as a human. Yet infinity would continue...

Simulation Hypothesis Circle Back Around

The key is that we call it infinity and we do have this concept. The further we look outward there seems to be something there, the further we look inward there seems to be something there.

So it seems infinite at this moment.

With procedural generation we are already doing similar things ourselves. The only limitation that occurs is wrapped into how many bytes we use to represent a number.

Thus as we increase those we could effectively make simulations (now) that the concept of infinity inwards and outwards seems even more vast than what we have encountered in reality.

I do think though that if we ARE in a simulation then the only way we would ever find out is IF there is a numerical limitation in the simulation around the concept of infinity. If there is then it is at the edges of the maximum numbers where strange things would happen. This is what I wrote about in that other article...

Okay... good enough for now... I'm going to climb back out of the rabbit hole, though it still seemed to go on in the distance as I turned around.

For those interested that missed the older post... I kind of had a brief series... here are a couple more in that series.

Steem On!

I've been called a good moderator... I've been told I'm respectful... sometimes it just doesn't work that way.

Verbal is not always as easy

Going deep and technical here - this was not in the chat

Simulation Hypothesis Circle Back Around