Simulating Matter

A few days ago a friend at work and I were having a debate about rather or not it is possible to have a computer simulate a more advanced computer which simulates another more advanced computer and so on. I think it's possible and he doesn't think it is. I'm wondering what you all think about this.

I thought of this idea from movies like The Matrix and from the law that matter can't be created or destroyed. Computers are getting smaller and requiring less energy. So, it's taking less matter to do more things. To me it seems like computers eventually will get so advanced that they will be able to simulate matter. It seems possible to me that a virtual world can be simulated to be a perfect copy of this one where it wont just have realistic looking pictures of a world like ours but would have programmed in it the same natural laws as the real world and even have atoms. A virtual world so perfect that if scientist went into it the only way they can tell the difference between it and the real world is their knowledge that it's fake.

I'm wondering if it's possible that someday a computer can be able to simulate more matter than the computer is made of and in a sense creating matter. So, you can have a super computer as big as a laptop that has a simulation of a bigger more powerful computer in it, a bigger one in the second one, and so forth. So, you can have a laptop that is as powerful as a computer as big as the moon.

I don't know how well I'm explaining this but it seems to me that either we will max out in computer technology because computers will have to get bigger and bigger until we would have to make a computer as big as the moon to do what we want it to do or we would have to create computers within computers.

Do you understand what I'm saying because after all I am schizophretarded? Do you think this is possible?

I understand exactly what you're saying and I agree that it's possible.

STOP TALKING TO YOURSELF YOU FREAK

Schiz sazs:

Quote :

is possible to have a computer simulate a more advanced computer which simulates another more advanced computer and so on.

Schiz is right.

Gene Amdahl developed the IBM "VM" operating system back in the 60s. VM stands for Virtual Machine. The Virtual Machine was a software environment that was capable of running and interpreting a foreign set of instructions. It was the tool IBM used to develop the IBM 360, then 370 operating systems. The present day kernel of microsoft’s OSs is based on VM, I think for a while they called it Virtual Machine and then NT. The Gene Amdahl VM was capable of running several (actually an infinite number) of VMs within a VM. So you could say OS1 running on a piece of hardware would run an application called OS2 (which actually was running in software) which could run an application called OS3 (which was running in OS2’s software) and so on, nested as deep as the developer needed.

Software creating hardware? I rather doubt it. That is why the product of VM was a Virtual Machine.

I've recently done some reading on quantum computers which would be (we've made a few very primitive ones) beyond light years ahead of our digital ones. Theoretically, the universe would be indistinguishable from a quantum computer.

You take your life in your hands looking into that stuff, so if we never hear from you again, we'll know what happened.

Schizophretard wrote:

I thought of this idea from movies like The Matrix and from the law that matter can't be created or destroyed. Computers are getting smaller and requiring less energy. So, it's taking less matter to do more things.

Actually it's that computers are becoming more efficient handlers of information. It takes less energy now to process more information then ever before.

Computers are still light years away from the human brain when it comes to information processing efficiency however. Like Painful says though, quantum computers may be very likely to help bridge that gap.

Schizophretard wrote:

To me it seems like computers eventually will get so advanced that they will be able to simulate matter. It seems possible to me that a virtual world can be simulated to be a perfect copy of this one where it wont just have realistic looking pictures of a world like ours but would have programmed in it the same natural laws as the real world and even have atoms.

That would take a lot of energy.

"That would take a lot of energy."

That could be equivalent to saying it would take (took) all the energy contained in the universe to program/actualize the universe.

The Paineful Truth wrote:

"That would take a lot of energy."

That could be equivalent to saying it would take (took) all the energy contained in the universe to program/actualize the universe.

That's it.

Plus one photon.