Has James Gates Discovered Computer Code in String Theory Equations? [2012] | Hacker News Reader

Has James Gates Discovered Computer Code in String Theory Equations? [2012]

transcend.ws

14 pointsxd17 comments

This is a link to Gate's layman writup of the work http://www.onbeing.org/program/uncovering-codes-reality/feat...

Hamming codes are in the equations, which he thinks is a sign that someone put them there. Or alternatively, perhaps its impossible for an information preserving universe to exist without them (anthropic principle)

Can somebody who is not brain dead (as the author of the article seems to be) summarise what Gates actually means? I can't watch the video because I'm at work and the article itself is completely devoid of meaningful content.

Well, you see, first you get some really good pot and a few tabs of acid, and then…

Thank you. This whole article seems like so much sci-fi-conspiracy-theorist-gone-pseudo-physics-fanboy with no actual description of what Gates is talking about.

I recall watching him sometime back explain it as follows.

In the guts of string theory lay error correcting "code" similar to some of the error correcting codes used in computer networking algorithms.

I think it is reasonable to assume that the observable universe is an "emergent property" of some fairly simple and straightforward "rules". But therein lies a great difficulty - even if/when we get to the rules they will be very difficult to relate to the physics we observe.

The fact that the underlying "rules" might be simple and thus might be conceived of as some sort of program hardly leads one to the conclusion that reality is a computer simulation.

Isn't this basically what Stephen Wolfram was describing in "A new kind of science"?

It's not quite as spectacular as it sounds[1].

I've not read the paper, but it seems as if they've just found a convenient way to describe supermultiplets in 1D using doubly even codes[2].

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.4124

[2] http://planetmath.org/evencode

Nope, and here's why: If you take a valid code and flip one bit, you get an invalid code. But if you take a particle and (somehow) change one attribute, you get a completely valid particle. It's impossible to change just one attribute at a time, but you can wander around the graph and eventually arrive at every point.

Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_Out_%28game%29 ?

But I don't see how your explanation is compatible with their claim that found a neat structure like a "doubly even self-dual linear" ECC. If their claim is that all transitions maintain that structure, then you are guaranteed to stay inside the structure no matter how long you wander around the graph.

I was thinking more like a Drunkard's Walk[1]. Eventually, every possible location (state) will be visited.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_walk

If you have an integer random walk and the step sizes are multiples of 3, you cannot reach a location that is not a multiple of 3. The ECC structure they described is similar to the set of multiples of 3: for example, an analog computer trying to simulate such a walk would periodically round the location to the nearest multiple of 3 to counter the effects of noise. The rounding does not change correct computations (becase they would already be multiples of 3), but it increases the likelihood that the result of the computation is correct.

Right, but here, each half of the graph is a different code. If you screw up a "white dot", you just get a "black dot".

wouldn't the more obvious conclusion be that the Hamming codes are a reflection of the universe instead of the other way around....

You can test for a computer simulation: http://www.simulation-argument.com/

Yes, I'm sure our Universe runs on $hitty assembler code (or maybe it's C and Java?) :-)

Why I am reading this crap?

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