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Comment by lebuffon | Hacker News Reader

Don't tell anyone, but in the back of my mind I wonder if what we call quantum mechanics has something to do with the rendering engine in this simulation we find ourselves in.

Is quantum collapse just us "catching" the engine deciding what to render when we observe something? :-)

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I have very little knowledge of quantum physics, but in my mind there is some similarity between quantum phenomena and backward raytracing in computer graphics.

In forward raytracing, images are rendered by "shooting" photons from all lightsources and seeing which ones end up hitting the player's camera. This is similar to what we think happens in nature, but the calculation is extremely inefficient, because the vast majority of photons never hit the player's viewpoint.

In backward raytracing, we only shoot "photons" backwards from the player's camera, and see which rays end up hitting a light source. This computation is much more efficient.

It makes me wonder if our "simulation" uses a similar shortcut

That's my interpretation as well, except I'd go a step further and say it's time-independent based on what we've seen of quantum entanglement. There's no reason to resolve a particle's state if it's not interacting with anything, but once you do you can safely define the entangled pair's state retroactively because it hasn't interacted with anything either.

So what we end up seeing is that after you measure one particle, the other behaves as if it always had the complementary value. It's not faster-than-light spooky action at a distance, it's more akin to reality "resolving" to a consistent time-independent state.

Maybe, but it would be a highly non-classical computer. Probably it could cheaply render the most physically plausible paths to specified outcomes, and quickly factor large primes.

Nb. quantum also highlights assumptions made by our brain's rendering engine.

The tricky part with using quantum physics as evidence for a simulation is that it's weird, but it's only a specific amount of weird. A simulated universe could easily be weirder; why isn't P=NP obviously true?

A lot of people who work with computers get this idea. :) But it seems rather unlikely, as quantum-mechanical models are actually more expensive to compute. Quantization is not at all similar to pixelization or rounding effect, it's fundamentally different. Quantum computers being more powerful than classic computers hints that it's not a simplification, on contrary.

Maybe. Considering that the simulation is taking place on a nearly infinite large white sand dessert with a turtle meticulously moving rocks according to a simple set of rules, there are bound to be hiccups in the physics engine part.

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