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.