Party

Dr. Stevens – Ned – introduced the team to the Greystle Group today. These guys are the ones who gave us the grant to make this possible; they put the money behind this, instead of just all the talk. A dinner party… yes, I was as excited as you are.

I’ve seen articles, books, and films about simulated worlds from decades back (Ned has quite a collection), but it’s been possible to do this for at least 5 years. The cost was the wall. And I guess that wall finally got cheap enough for Greystle to bite the bullet for us.

Of course they get a healthy chunk of the patents that we are already grinding out just in setting this up. How they make money off of this esoteric code is their issue.

At least there was free food at the party. A bunch of basement dwellers meeting incredibly boring powerful wealthy folks was not as an amusing sitcom set up as you would think.

Yes, I know we just sit all day staring at our screens, hands deep in sensors, but god these guys were dull. Vacuous really. How the hell do you get to be so connected and so rich and just have a frat house level of interest in reality is beyond me.

Janice brought her daughter Sally to the party. Poor girl. She’s big now – I think she’s six. I remember when Sally was born in our sophomore year. It felt like we all had suddenly taken a step into adulthood (though not quite a big a step as for Janice). Sally got quite a big family – basically the whole Alpha team.

Did I mention that it is weird that we are called the Alpha team when there is no other “team” in the Dulles Tech Simulations Department?

Janice is our biologist. She’s overseeing all the life Alpha contains. Or will. Maybe. She is busy though, summing up “life” into a series of rules and requirements. And sum is the correct word. The idea is to let Alpha develop. Gravity is a simple rule when you get down to it, and so are other core things that make up “reality,” and in the end so is Life. What becomes life (How it becomes) based on our basic rules is what the Alpha project is about. She really is the big wig of the project for that reason.

Janice is also the team mom because she really is a mom and we’re all just Sally’s bigger brothers and sisters.

The only person who seemed to have fun at the party was Jack. Jack is our lead technologist – the hardware man if you want – but it is software that makes this possible. He makes sure we are “up and running.” It’s his wild scattered imagination that is his real gift to the team. Quantum Compression, the theory that makes a large-scale simulation like ours possible, almost reasonable, was his concept. Adit is our algorithm God; he made Quantum Compression work, but just the idea (as amazingly obvious as it is now) came from Jack.

Many of Jack’s ideas are worthless though. And he seems to have a new one almost every day. At the party he kept pushing one of the Greystle ladies to invest in his idea of a children’s book series. The books would have names like “Nietzsche for nippers, Kant for kids, Buddhism for babies, and Jung for youngsters. It was hilarious hearing him explain to her how it would read: “Zarathustra says God is Dead. Dead Dead Dead..” She didn’t seem interested.

In the end the party really was a bust. But Ned just seemed relieved that none of us screwed anything up. No wine stains on our investors thank you.

Quantum Compression

The main issue earlier large-scale simulations encountered is the sheer horsepower needed to just get it all right. From the atom to the look of the night sky.

It was Jack who came up with the quantum compression concepts – initially as a joke to answer the age old “are we a simulation ourselves” question. His answer was that just as with the concept of God we can’t disprove it, and as with God unless some deep voice booms out from the clouds in the skies and says “‘ello just us testin’ out some ideas – carry on” we will never know. Jack believes that as long and as hard as we look God or the simulation will just give us more questions. Or reality. Whatever. When you see it then it exists, until then God, the simulation, or reality doesn’t even bother working out the details.

And that was Jack’s idea. An observed phenomenon is a changed phenomenon. That is how it works in reality, and that is what Adit took and coded into our simulation.

All reality (if there is one) and all of the simulation that is not “sentient” (sentience really just being self modifying algorithms) is just an algorithm, a rule “unexploded” when unobserved, and when observed it is a seemingly endless series of Russian dolls that will go on forever for as long as the observation continues. “Look we found atoms, the smallest of the small… no wait, now we’ve found electrons, protons, and neutrons truly the smallest of the small… no wait….” etc. etc.

Now there is no need to run out of server power working out the whole simulation – only what is observed is rendered. The observer could be a sentient entity within the simulation, or the observer could be us watching our simulation unfold. All the potential is stored up in the algorithm. All the cause and effect, from time to wind to water salination is accounted for, and if we want to check on that portion of the simulation the code explodes and unwinds. The servers crunch the data and we see the results as if they were being rendered the entire time. And when I say “render” I just mean feedback on what we are probing. Not pretty pictures. Though we can do that – its cool when we do.

Our First Die Off

In our planet’s history there have been multiple periods of mass extinctions, Die Offs, where changes in environment or atmosphere or something cause a significant percentage of life on the planet to disappear.

I guess I wouldn’t want Alpha to be different as it is supposed to teach us what life (and the history of life) could look like on a different planet.

But it is still hard to see the Alphans (so many types of slugs!) disappear. To Janice it is like watching pets die, for Adit it is like knowing the code you worked so hard on was removed in beta; I’m not sure what it is for me except that it leaves me cold. I don’t want these things, bits of data, to die.

But they are.

First it was what should be one of the hardiest form of life, bacteria. Strains of this and strains of that started dying off and we didn’t notice until we started comparing the life count summaries we get at the end of each day.

Then we slowed down the simulation a tad so we could see in more detail what was happening. You’d think the die off would move up the food chain if it started with the bacteria, but then larger species far removed in the food chain started dying off, and then a variety of grasses. The cause and effect is impossible to track.

But track it is why were doing all of this.

Adit and Alice are leading most of the development team in going over the code in greater detail to make sure this isn’t a software bug (how awful it would be to find out that this pivotal moment in the history of Alpha is an error in some routine). So far nothing seems wrong, just as with the invertebrate issue, this seems to be part of Alpha’s evolution.

Kaitlin and Janice have been going through the snap shot archives of Alpha to see if there were any earlier signs of chemical changes in the atmosphere that we might have missed. The snapshots are hard archives of a moment in time in Alpha. Alpha is just too huge and memory intensive to record so every ten minutes of real runtime a moment in time is frozen and stored. Given that our simulation speeds have varied from real time to as fast as the servers can go, the snapshots capture intervals as short as ten minutes up to hundreds of thousands of years in Alpha time.

The tricky thing is that the snapshots are literally of what was, and as much of what Alpha is, is various algorithms unfolding, interacting, and rewriting themselves with a touch of randomness. So though it is Alpha’s past if Alpha started again from there (then?) the present Alpha we see might not be the Alpha that unspools. i.e. that past could lead to infinite versions of the present. Statistically they’d average out to be the same, but tell that to the dead slugs.

So far it looks like this was the natural evolution of the planet but we’ll continue looking into it. Like I said, Earth has gone through many such die offs in its history, so this maybe just be the first for Alpha, but it is awful to watch the list of extinct Alphans fly by on the screen.

One nice thing is that Alice has updated her NetTat to a still Mickey Mouse. I guess she realized the animated evolution tattoo she had on her arm earlier the week wasn’t in good taste once the die off started to happen.

A new member of our motley crew

Today I interviewed the soon to be newest member of Adit’s software team. He’s a freak and will fit right in.

Stan Chen is a theoretical physicist. Alpha though isn’t theoretical nor is the software that runs it. No, we need Chen to work out the physics of Alpha in even more detail; really we need to know better about what we can hide.

Alpha is possible with our equipment because of Jack and Adit’s “quantum compression” that renders information only when needed. This could be because of us wanting to see data on what is happening in Alpha or something interacts with something else on Alpha.

Since for millions and millions of Alphan years the interactions on Alpha were simply physical (volcanoes, cooling plates, ocean waves, etc) and mathematically predictable this tactic saved us a lot of horse power.

But as Alphans appeared, be it slime, bugs, or mammals, our rendering has been continuous as all these independent beings interact, observe, and evolve. Our rendering speed has gone from millions of years or more a day to less than a few hundred thousand a day (at the most).

We need to come up with more efficient rules to save on cpu queries. Chen could let us use the latest theories on the behavior of macro and micro physics (we have got Newton covered) and basically come up with ways for us to cheat. Because the day is coming when we’ll have animals that might notice more than just the movement of the sun and stars but perhaps study them and we’ve got to make sure we have a bit more there… there.

Chen’s CV is perfect but I had heard that he hadn’t been able to hold any one position for long. The fact that he’d found other projects to work on after being kicked off of others is an unfortunate proof of his abilities.Chen seemed to be relieved that I had asked so bluntly about his problems holding down a job. He blamed it on his episodes. Every few weeks Chen loses a day of work because he has had a temporal lobe seizure. He is epileptic. The “episodes” as he calls them only last a few minutes but the experience wipes him out for at least a day. It drains him physically and mentally, and he pretty much has to sleep the day away.Previous employers refused to accept this excuse because Chen himself refused to take medication. Without going into detail I assured him that I was very understanding of those who wanted to avoid medication and as long as Adit’s team’s work wasn’t hindered by his occasional absences then there shouldn’t be any problem with him joining us on the simulation projects. And then he pushed it and explained why he doesn’t take medication. And if I had any doubts about him before this, this put them to rest. This guy was a nut but the type of nut that would be perfect for this project.

He didn’t believe he had a disease per se, but rather he was somehow wired differently and that allowed him to occasionally crossover into other universes. Seriously.

When he has an episode he has brief flashes of memories of things that did not actually happen. Not wild dream like scenes, but realistic scenarios of trips with friends or dinner at certain restaurants. But he also consciously knows as he experiences these memories that they are not actually his. The experience he has is disconcerting, confusing, and physically draining. Deja vu with an attitude. But he doesn’t think these are just false memories that are a byproduct of a bunch on neurons firing randomly but that they are real memories. Memories from a different him.

Chen is a strong proponent of the multiverse theory where our reality is actually just a small sideways glance at what truly exists. Our universe is just the view from one point on the shore of an infinite ocean. And infinite other points of this shore are infinite other versions of our lives, even our lives without us. Chen goes so far as to believe that every probability created from the movement of an atomic particle exists. An infinite number of universes with Earth, an infinite number with Earth but not me (sucks to be me), an infinite number with me but with me still having my beard. Etc. An infinite number of infinites.

With all these universes occasionally energies can cross over and be detected, though not necessarily understood. It could be the Voyagers mysteriously slowing down as they left our solar system or it could explain the nonexistent mass that is dark matter and even dark energy. Or, as Chen explains to me, it could be thoughts that occasionally cross over from different versions of yourself. Memory leaks (now I know he’d be perfect from software design).

He calls this phenomenon a Mental Teseract. I tell him to keep it himself for now.

That said maybe when things calm down around here his idea will be a great dinnertime conversation piece.