From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Jun 07 2003 - 00:16:14 MDT
Harvey Newstrom wrote:
>
> You need a professional hacker! They are great for figuring out how to
> detect, probe, evaluate, and ultimately manipulate remote unseen
> computing forces by using ordinary communications and interactions in
> such a way as to get unexpected results. If we are in a simulation, a
> hacker should be able to figure it out.
>
> (Hmmm... unless the hackers capable of doing this are programmed to
> disbelieve that we are in a simulation so they never try! Nah...!)
Well, then...
Let's suppose that we're in a simulation. Any number of simulations,
perhaps, since you can't distinguish between the pointer states. Some
simulations go all the way down to the quantum level; others are only as
detailed as they need to be.
Supposing that "this" world is a low-resolution sim, what kind of action
would it take to force the simulator to compute you in greater detail?
Let's say that I have a small electronic voice recorder. If I speak into
the voice recorder, download the audio file to my computer, and examine
its internals bit by bit, then for the simulation of my high-level self to
be accurate and fairly representative of probability, the simulation must
have been accurate enough to determine any sensitivies of the voice
recorder to minor subtleties of tone, background noise, and so on.
Otherwise I'd see a '0' instead of a '1' when viewing the hex dump, which
makes a gross difference to my cognitive processing.
Aside from speaking into a voice recorder, does anyone else have any
suggestions for creating a permanent record of an event which would force
that event to be simulated in greater detail? In particular, such that
for the simulator to get a historically accurate probability distribution
on the gross characteristics of the permanent record created (its ones and
zeroes, which would be later examined), the simulator would find it useful
to simulate the original event in greater-than-usual detail.
Note that we are talking about making it *useful* for the simulator to
expend more computing power, to simulate to a greater depth, in order to
get a *more accurate* picture of the *probability distribution* of the
ones and zeroes in the permanent record. This means that the probability
distribution of the permanent record depends on fine physical details in a
way which can be usefully refined by expending more computing power.
Assume that the initial conditions are 'spread out' evenly over whatever
space of possibilities is permitted by the state of the existing
low-resolution simulation at the moment when it begins modeling at greater
detail, so that what we want is not just sensitive dependency on initial
conditions, but the simulator's ability to get a more historically
realistic picture of the probability distribution, after dropping from the
previous low resolution into the evenly distributed high-resolution
initial conditions, by expending more computing power to model the
convergence of the development of those initial conditions at a finer
level of detail. So what we want is a physical process, which converges
to some degree, which creates sensitive dependency in the permanent
record, such that a noticeably more refined picture of the probability
distribution of the permanent record can be obtained by expending more
computing power to simulate that moment at a finer level of resolution.
Or if that's too complicated: some way of creating a permanent record that
sensitively depends on small details of the sim - either expensively,
using off-the-shelf equipment, or (bonus points) using stuff lying around
the house.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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