Ask HN: I wrote a recursive story. Want to know if my thinking is correct.

1 pointsrecusive_story7y ago1 comments

Disclaimer this might be a bit too long so sorry if doesn't add any value to you.

Yesterday I wrote a very short story which goes like this: We are in a recurring simulation. Each simulation is actually a speeding up to find the perfect computer. As we approach to solve the problem, the world resets and starts again to find the perfect computer. As we approach to solve the problem, the world resets and the perfect computer...

I thought this seems to be recursive but it's just that the same sentence repeats to give that illusion. So I thought I should write a bigger story and see what happens. And so I wrote this: Details that can be added into the above story. So the higher entity has found that humans cannot be kept in a vegetative state and the matter cost of frequently replacing us is very high. To optimise this we have come up with a software that runs in the brain. The diary is a detailing of this software. We run a simulation where the brain starts from the stone age or some even more primitive state. So that when they have full function of the brain but the only thing they lack is knowledge. With each turn of his life and he's progressing through an increase in knowledge in the human mind. As human's start to grow in number the collective knowledge increases and the time to the acquire more knowledge keeps of decreasing. Then we reach the point where they are not able to know the their birth but at that very moment the software's platform computer resets or has a segmentation fault. This the maximum strength computer the machines have built till now. The machines are constrained by resources and not able to develop better computers. They have timed the resource utilisation of running the farms with this software to the end of the earth. So that resources end at the precise time the sun dies. continues in comments...

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recusive_storyOP7y ago

Mechanic of the Simulation: The machines found that the simulation cannot be run continuously. So they let the humans body rest in relation to their body age. This comes from the idea that humans start at the start of stone age where there are less humans and others would be in some form of coma. As the story progresses in the simulation the humans are woken up into the dream. So according to this description the young ones are woken up earlier and older ones are woken up later.

This is done in a farm. The oldest one is the last to die. This way whole farm can run 3 - 4 times before the people gain conscience. Farms die at rate which the machines can create and start new farms. When the earth is about to die, there will be only on farm left and no more resource to create more.

This simulation diary can be written over and over again by exploiting a very slightly illogical statement that doesn't seem so and keep on writing infinitely. I think this is like prime series from mathematics. I don't know how much this can grow or does it even have an end. I don't know if my analogy is correct. I'm pretty sure this a infinitely recursive story of thread of word where I can start at any point and say that this is a wrong statement and start again by building about a new story around it. Like if this story is a function applied on itself and we spit out more words and keep the story going with another bullshit term.

Is the way I wrote the story wrong?

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