Here's a paradoxical dilemma for you to ponder. Suppose the devil comes to you and offers you a choice. If you choose option A, you have a 90% chance of gaining a billion dollars, and a 10% chance of losing everything. If you choose option B, you have a 10% chance of gaining a billion dollars, and a 90% chance of losing everything. Obviously, you choose option A. But, it's your unlucky day, and it turns out you lose everything.
Ten years later, that is, ten years of slaving away in the acid mines of Siberia later, the Devil shows up again. He offers you a chance to go back in time, exactly back to the fateful day when you took his wager. Back into the same body you inhabited then. Everything exactly identical. Of course, you jump at the opportunity. Soon, the devil is standing before you, back in time, and offering you the same two fateful choices.
Which do you choose?
On the one hand, 90% beats 10%, hands down. But on the other hand, you already took the 90% option last time, and it failed you! Won't it fail you again?!
The question boils down to whether or not there's real randomness in the universe. How does the devil determine whether the 90% chance of you becoming a billionaire succeeds or fails? What does chance or probability even mean in the real world?
In video games, random numbers are an illusion. They're actually just "pseudo-random" numbers, generated using some difficult-to-predict mathematical algorithms.
Now that technology has advanced so far since the original video games, that unpredictability is becoming more predictable. People run games on emulators on the computer-- programs which simulate the old video game. But because technology is so much stronger now, the emulators have additional options, like the ability to save a state and jump back to it later. And when you jump back to a saved state-- like having the Devil whisk you back to the fateful day, in the dilemma-- the random number generator also jumps back.
This means that in the videogame, seemingly "random" events can be manipulated, because they're not really "random" at all. If you make a save state, walk ten feet, get hit by a "random" battle, and then reload the save state and walk those same ten feet, you'll get hit by the same "random" battle again. Or, you can alter your behavior and maybe avoid the battle. In some videogames, depending how they work, you can skip all "random" battles entirely by just manipulating the random numbers like crazy.
It's very useful for making speedruns of old video games.
But what about real life? Here's a thought experiment. Suppose the universe is a video game being run by an Almighty God on his Almighty Computer. Well, it's been several billion years, probably by now God has upgraded His computer. Imagine He's upgraded His computer enough, getting so much more CPU power and RAM, that he can completely emulate this universe (programmed now for an obsolete old computer), and make save states.
If God resets the universe to an old save state, does the "random number generator" reset too?
Now here's some funny video game trivia. In the game Final Fantasy 6, there's an attack called "metamorphosis" which randomly transforms your enemy into a treasure, if it succeeds. With different treasures for different monsters. For each monster, there's two or three possible treasures, supposedly. At least, that's what it seems the programmers intended. But because of the way the pseudo-random number generator works in that game, certain treasures are *never* realized in this way. In order for them to appear, the random number generator would have to spit out such-and-such a sequence of random numbers, and the way the generator works, that sequence just happens to be impossible. So, something which appears to be very possible, just looking at the assembly code and assuming random numbers are really random, isn't actually possible at all.
I wonder whether there could be any similar anomalies in Real Life. Imagine, if some events which are "meant" to be possible, are actually impossible because the Universe's "random" number generator isn't really random. It's interesting to think about.
This is the fifth article in my slowly growing series, "Life Is A Game". Here are the other articles in that series so far:
Real-Life Tool-Assisted Speedrun (TAS)?
Life Is A Game
Intelligent Design And Intelligent Video Games
Levels And Experience Points In Real Life
Ten years later, that is, ten years of slaving away in the acid mines of Siberia later, the Devil shows up again. He offers you a chance to go back in time, exactly back to the fateful day when you took his wager. Back into the same body you inhabited then. Everything exactly identical. Of course, you jump at the opportunity. Soon, the devil is standing before you, back in time, and offering you the same two fateful choices.
Which do you choose?
On the one hand, 90% beats 10%, hands down. But on the other hand, you already took the 90% option last time, and it failed you! Won't it fail you again?!
The question boils down to whether or not there's real randomness in the universe. How does the devil determine whether the 90% chance of you becoming a billionaire succeeds or fails? What does chance or probability even mean in the real world?
In video games, random numbers are an illusion. They're actually just "pseudo-random" numbers, generated using some difficult-to-predict mathematical algorithms.
Now that technology has advanced so far since the original video games, that unpredictability is becoming more predictable. People run games on emulators on the computer-- programs which simulate the old video game. But because technology is so much stronger now, the emulators have additional options, like the ability to save a state and jump back to it later. And when you jump back to a saved state-- like having the Devil whisk you back to the fateful day, in the dilemma-- the random number generator also jumps back.
This means that in the videogame, seemingly "random" events can be manipulated, because they're not really "random" at all. If you make a save state, walk ten feet, get hit by a "random" battle, and then reload the save state and walk those same ten feet, you'll get hit by the same "random" battle again. Or, you can alter your behavior and maybe avoid the battle. In some videogames, depending how they work, you can skip all "random" battles entirely by just manipulating the random numbers like crazy.
It's very useful for making speedruns of old video games.
But what about real life? Here's a thought experiment. Suppose the universe is a video game being run by an Almighty God on his Almighty Computer. Well, it's been several billion years, probably by now God has upgraded His computer. Imagine He's upgraded His computer enough, getting so much more CPU power and RAM, that he can completely emulate this universe (programmed now for an obsolete old computer), and make save states.
If God resets the universe to an old save state, does the "random number generator" reset too?
Now here's some funny video game trivia. In the game Final Fantasy 6, there's an attack called "metamorphosis" which randomly transforms your enemy into a treasure, if it succeeds. With different treasures for different monsters. For each monster, there's two or three possible treasures, supposedly. At least, that's what it seems the programmers intended. But because of the way the pseudo-random number generator works in that game, certain treasures are *never* realized in this way. In order for them to appear, the random number generator would have to spit out such-and-such a sequence of random numbers, and the way the generator works, that sequence just happens to be impossible. So, something which appears to be very possible, just looking at the assembly code and assuming random numbers are really random, isn't actually possible at all.
I wonder whether there could be any similar anomalies in Real Life. Imagine, if some events which are "meant" to be possible, are actually impossible because the Universe's "random" number generator isn't really random. It's interesting to think about.
This is the fifth article in my slowly growing series, "Life Is A Game". Here are the other articles in that series so far:
Real-Life Tool-Assisted Speedrun (TAS)?
Life Is A Game
Intelligent Design And Intelligent Video Games
Levels And Experience Points In Real Life
Posts
1 comments:
When I was a mathematically inclined kid, I often used to wonder if randomness meant that we lived in a determistic universe and we just didn't have all the information necessary to state that a coin currently spinning in the air will land heads or tails, or if we live in a non-deterministic universe where - until the coin lands - there is no meaninful answer to the question.
The adults I tried to ask about this were unable to understand the question, let alone shed any light on it.
Anyway, I really enjoyed your post, but it brought me back to those frustrating days of not being understood!
Post a Comment