This bears a lot of similarity to Devs,[1] albeit pre-dating it by 13 years and doing a better job.
Though I was very much hoping that Alex Garland’s work on reinterpreting Annihilation would’ve given him the courage to lean into the totally inexplicable in Devs.
Both contain the same contradictions:
How can a computer calculate everything about the universe or a part of it with any degree of accuracy, without having space to store the information (i.e. having enough bits to store information on every subatomic particle and its state)?
If you treat the earth as a closed system say to try to get around this, your simulation is incomplete (e.g. excludes the influence of the sun).
An example from the article:
this thing could execute an infinite loop in less than ten seconds
In what sense could an infinite loop take 10 seconds? In what sense can you brute force the halting problem?
An example from devs:
The universe is a deterministic system, ergo the future can be predicted with full accuracy with enough inputs. But there are not enough qubits in the universe (which someone evidently told them, because it made it into the script, but is then blithely ignored).