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Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

I really hope they don't accidentally trigger a divide by zero error and we have to start over again.

Imagine if you not only realized you were living in a simulation but that the simulation involved randomness (god playing dice) and you could somehow force backtracking with a simple button so that different values were chosen. Now, play the lottery and hit that button whenever you don't win; you could then surface an unlikely universe where you get really lucky.

Have you heard of Max Tegmark's quantum suicide argument? If you believe it sufficiently, well, buy a lottery ticket and cyanide, and really commit yourself to it :)

(No, please, do NOT do this.)

Let us for a moment, assume that the quantum suicide argument is correct. It is probably more likely that you will somehow survive the cyanide with life-long debilitating effects than for you to actually win the lottery.

Hah, that's very cool. I came up with this as an idea for a short story a couple of days ago (except slightly more drastically, as it involved the complete annihilation of humanity on a failure condition, allowing the practitioner to drag everyone else with him into his preferred outcome-world). I'm simultaneously pleased and displeased that someone's already given it a lot of thought.

like "cmd z" all the way back to the big bang?

It's unlikely to work unless the button is so reliable that you have a better chance of winning the lottery than the button/mechanism failing in some (possibly undetectable) way. It's the same argument against trying to use quantum immortality to force a miracle by killing yourself, or constructing a machine to kill you, unless some desirable event occurs. It's much more likely that your machine will fail, or you'll change your mind.

We could imagine that the simulation naturally backtracks given a paradox or dead end. So if the lottery is rigged, I would never get rich, and the simulation would just backtrack to where I would never decide to try this.

The mechanism by which you construct that paradox would still be a mechanism that can fail, just (presumably) not a mechanical one.

I'm sure they do checkpointing and can roll back in the event of a problem. This has probably happened many times already.

I cant help but picture two mice trying to reconstruct the question from a human brain

I was thinking of this one as I wrote that:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Checkpointing does require a lot of resources and very large scale simulation like a simulation of whole universe may prohibit such checkpointing.

That depends on the scales involved in the universe where the simulation is being run. Maybe we're easy :-P

Divide by zero exceptions run in a try {} catch {} block. It's called a black hole.

gives a whole new meaning to the term blue screen of death

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