https://www.quantamagazine.org/inside-the-proton-the-most-co...
Consider programs that are quines, programs are able to output the exact source code of the program. See [1].
And there are abstract computers that can produce any computable output. These are called Universal Turing Machines, see [2]. UTMs can be specified with a remarkably small number of internal states, see [3].
I’m not saying you are wrong, but computability is full of unintuitive results, and the answer may be more subtle than what is revealed by “just thinking about it”.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Turing_machine
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram%27s_2-state_3-symbol...
> To better understand the coronavirus’s journey from one person to another, a team of 50 scientists has for the first time created an atomic simulation of the coronavirus nestled in a tiny airborne drop of water.
> To create the model, the researchers needed one of the world’s biggest supercomputers to assemble 1.3 billion atoms and track all their movements down to less than a millionth of a second. This computational tour de force is offering an unprecedented glimpse at how the virus survives in the open air as it spreads to a new host.
> ...
> Once the virus was loaded into an aerosol, the scientists faced the biggest challenge of the project: bringing the drop to life. Dr. Amaro and her colleagues calculated the forces at work across the entire aerosol, taking into account the collisions between atoms as well as the electric field created by their charges. They determined where each atom would be four millionths of a billionth of a second later.
> To carry out this vast set of calculations, the researchers had to take over the Summit Supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the second most powerful supercomputer in the world. Because the machine was in high demand, they could run their simulation only a few times. “We only have so many shots to actually see if we can get this thing to actually fly,” Dr. Amaro said.
> The first run was a disaster. Tiny flaws in their model caused the virtual atoms to crash into one another, and the aerosol instantly blew apart. “It basically explodes,” Dr. Amaro said.
> After half a dozen rounds of adjustments, the aerosol became stable. The researchers ran the calculations all over again to see what happened inside the aerosol an instant later. All told, they created millions of frames of a movie that captured the aerosol’s activity for ten billionths of a second.
-----
Aside: the "four millionths of a billionth of a second" is 4fs or 4x10^-15 seconds - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=four+millionths+of+a+bi...
> 0.4 x time for a typical water molecule vibration
The corresponding press release: https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/2021/11/16/we-know-covidisairborne...
The abstract presented - https://sc21.supercomputing.org/proceedings/tech_paper/tech_...
Preprint of paper that matches the abstract mentioned in the ornl press release - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8609898/
Quantum computing will change this though.
More fundamentally, quantum systems are inherently random. You literally can't know the exact future of hundreds of atoms in perpetuity--that's not how quantum physics works.
But you can get an idea of minimum energy states, the energy barriers holding those states in place, and therefore what the stable outcomes might be.
EDIT: I thought I'd double check that since it's been a while since I studied physics formally; apparently it is possible to model light nuclei[1] (up to four nucleons) from the ground up now!
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_initio_methods_(nuclear_p...
[1]
It's like polynomials: there's a quadratic formula, and a cubic and even quartic formula for exact solutions (although the quartic is ridiculous and no one would ever use it). Higher order polynomials have NO exact, closed-form solutions using standard arithmetic operations. But we can still solve any polynomial no matter the degree using numerical methods. To say that we don't even know how how degree 5 polynomials work would be flat out wrong.
However, it actually doesn't matter in any way whatsoever.
turns out the purpose was for them to study how the borg collective spreads across galaxies, and when we wipe out the borg we've ruined their experiment and they just pull the plug, because none of it was about us. oops.
People who believe in the simulation also tend to try and influence it (Scott Adams does), using a method indistinguishable from prayer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_the_Devil_Will_Drag_You_Un...
> In the year 2079, a human attempt to mine a nearby asteroid instead results in the asteroid being directed towards Earth. As catastrophic natural disasters envelop the world, Mac Walters and Jill McCulloch find themselves in Reno, Nevada. Entering a nearby bar, they encounter a demon named Asmodeus Mogart, who tells them that Earth is but one of thousands of universes set up by the mysterious Department of Probabilities, and that he can save the world if he can gather six magic jewels.