As flies to wanton boys are we to supercomputers, they diddle us for their sport — that is the sum of the simulation hypothesis, most recently supported by Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’s fuelled decades of fiction, but genre fans of the future may look back on 2017 as the year that the Matrix was powered down. A paper on quantum complexity by Zohar Ringel and Dmitry L Kovrizhin in the journal Science Advances in late September showed, on purely theoretical grounds, that present computer science cannot simulate even a tiny fraction of the universe. The complexity of the problem increases exponentially as more and more objects — atoms or subatomic particles, let us say — are simulated, and the limits of present computer science are rapidly outstripped. The world’s tech media had a good time ticking off Musk, but in hindsight, maybe he was talking about something slightly different. Musk had drawn attention to the exponential development of the sensorium offered by video games. He had compared Pong, the archetypal two-dimensional arcade game of table tennis released by Atari in 1972, with present games whose visuals and role-playing can be hyperreal. Pong never really arrived in India. Our original arcade game was Tomohiro Nishikado’s Space Invaders, which debuted in 1978 and was obsessively played for a rupee per shot — which was quite expensive, considering that a pulp paperback cost under Rs 5 at the time. But you would get Musk’s point if you compared the pathbreaking first person shooter series, Wolfenstein, one of the most pirated games in India, with contemporary point-of-view shoot-em-ups. If complexity is the signature of reality, video games have come very close to cloning it, and even improved upon it. But the simulation hypothesis never claimed to mimic reality. It posited reality itself, generated by future beings using unimaginably complex computers. One wonders why it was necessary to speculate about it at, though. Is there an urge to fill the void left by God or maya in a scientific world? It’s a pertinent question, because the hypothesis isn’t entirely scientific. It makes a lot of assumptions. The argument goes something like this: The universe contains an uncountable number of stars, many of which have planets, some of which may be assumed to support life, like the earth. Since life on earth is smart enough to have created computers, is may be assumed that computer science exists on other planets. Since the universe is godawfully old, some of that computer science may be assumed to be mature enough to simulate realities alternate to the universe. And it may be assumed that we stand a good chance of living in one of them. That’s really a lot of assumptions. Nick Bostrom, who started the simulated reality craze in 2003 with an article in the Philosophical Quarterly titled ‘Are You Living in a Computer Simulation’, had focused attention on a specific subset of the hypothesis: what if the simulating computer was made by our descendants? He speculated that if future generations of humanity had limitless computing power at their disposal, they would wish to learn about the remote past of the race by modelling it in multiple simulations. It’s a good idea because time travel is not an option, since it violates some of the fundamental ideas of physics. Since these simulations would outnumber reality, it then follows that most contemporary human minds are machine-based simulations rather than entities based on biology. And all their (our!) experiences, knowledge and emotions are likewise simulated. That’s not precisely what Bostrom said, but a serviceable account of how he was read by the lay public. And what of maya, which has been a philosophical concern since prehistoric times? Which of our godless readings is closer to it — the idea that a sufficiently fine-grained simulation, as in an immersive video game, is as good as reality? Or that an even more detailed simulation could be an alternate reality?
