Hey, it's not better or worse than any other way to guess.
Saying this is a kind of relativism that closes you off to receiving criticism for this view.
Here is some disagreement from the philosopher of information Luciano Floridi, "Against Digital Ontology": http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/4076/1/ado.pdf and its sister paper "A Defence of Informational Structural Realism": http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.135...
You might to be tempted to ignore this paper for being too technical, but it would be technical only because these are real issues that become difficult when put under serious reflection.
If you can stomach it you will be rewarded with deeper understanding.
The article seems to argue that since a digital system can simulate an analog system (through a DAC), reality cannot be either digital nor analog. But that doesn't matter, since as long a reality can simulate digital or analog phenomena, it can simulate the digital phenomena and create Turing machines.
The link to "A Defence of Informational Structural Realism" is broken.
Edit: page 7 discusses some of the points I complained about, but it does not seem particularly convincing to me (it only brushes them off, without explaining them). Admittedly, the language of philosophy is frequently unconvincing to me, so maybe the problem is in me.
For instance, HTML[1] is (IIRC) not turing complete, the computation power once you step into a layer of pure HTML prevents you from ever assembling a turing machine - no matter how many gigs of HTML you can pump out you'd never be able to produce a turing machine[2].
[1] Pure HTML, HTML + CSS apparently is turing complete.
[2] This disregards merely using HTML as a data definition format and using other logical components to enable the construction of a turing machine - a turing machine's tape is as simple as can be, so we don't really care about storage formats that can replicate the tape portion, we care about things that can replicate the full machine.
Well since we know the laws of physics can be used to implement a Turing machine, we therefore know the laws of physics support computation.
If I remember my college computability course correctly, any system that can be used to implement a Turing machine is itself Turing complete. Even if by no other means than to implement a Turing machine.
Besides you really don't need much: Branching, jumps, and a way to read/write. Voila, turing complete.
Infinite memory is helpful, but we consider computers Turing complete despite not having infinite memory. If you take infinite memory as a hard requirement then the entire universe together is not Turing complete. But that isn't useful so we often waive that part.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/physicists-find-we-re-not...
Perhaps most sufficiently complex domains are sufficient to build complexity-compounding realms.
I feel like most of the "X is Turing complete" posts are essentially saying "X can decrease entropy to an arbitrary fidelity" (while also having some simulation rules that run over the altered system).
* Network Extensions 2 (More roads.)
* Precision Engineering (Better placement of roads.)
* Move It (Fine adjustment of roads after placing them.)
* Traffic Manager PE (Better control of intersections.)
* Real Time (Better day/night/week cycle with rush hour.)
* Extended Game Options (More tiles to build on.)
Other than that, I assume the Linux version is fine.
It really brings up some interesting scenarios that I like to day dream about sometimes.
For instance, in a real world simulation, you could build a processor with a gazillion transistors because you don’t have to worry about the same physical limitations like size or heat. Could it take an input and compute an output faster than something in the real world?
Would you be bound by the speed of light in the virtual world? You control the physics in your virtual world, so technically nothing prevents it right? Information can travel faster than the speed of light relative to your virtual objects. Say you model the earth at 1:1 scale in the simulation and have avatars on complete opposite sides of earth. They could exchange messages faster than they could in the real world since the information wouldn’t have to physically travel across physical space. (e.g. send message directly to memory address X instead of sending light through fiber optic physics simulator).
Essentially, in a simulation of the physical world that has tweaked physics, could information be processed faster than the processor running the simulation?
Is there some sort of conservation of energy law, but for information?
On the first topic, if you can stomach having to reformat a PDF, the "No Free Lunch in Machine Learning" guy wrote a paper on thermodynamics and psychological time:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226069884_Memory_sy...
On the second one... I think it's more interesting to think if there's a theory of relativity for computation. Imagine if two systems were updating one another's state but were separated by physical distance. Wouldn't you have to hold the state of one to only update when it a receives a message from the other, for the systems to "experience" instantaneous communication? That would mean there would be a third system for whom time would have to pass to transfer the message and compute it in such a way that the amount of updating required for the receiving systems are minimal.
Maybe we have to guarantee that at least one system has to experience time more slowly than the others, to compute the information necessary for instanaeity to be true for the communicating systems.
That means the real world simulation would be as big as the real world. To exchange messages from one side to another means the information has to travel from some point in the physical network to another. Although the nodes may be closer in the physical network than in the virtual world, taking less time, that can't be true for any two nodes.
On average, a full simulation of something will be as physically large as the thing itself, and the distance information has to travel is on average the same virtually and physically.
What if it's not a full simulation? Then you can break those rules. I can draw two galaxies and a spaceship that travels between them in seconds therefore achieving your premise.
Can a restricted simulation ever be computationally faster than a reality/a full simulation? My intuition says no. I can't think of a source.
No. Whatever you do to process the information could always be done faster if you did it directly on a computer without the overhead of the simulation itself.
Nope, the simulator has to run it still - how would the simulation update anything unless being told to by the processor running the simulation?
I like the game a lot. But to be fair: you must download a good traffic control mod to setup traffic lights and road settings to keep the traffic under control.
Old Pharaoh style city builders certainly have a good deal more challenge when it comes to survival, but they're quite discrete and once you have a few templates for housing and industry nailed down I don't think they have much more difficulty to offer either.
I'd suggest looking at SimCity 4 for the peak of the in-depth city simulator. The systems in it go way deeper, it isn't limited by inevitable scaling problems with agent simulations (Tropico, even C:S), and there's a large, long-running modding community for it.
There's a few mods that would be considered basically essential, namely the Network Addon Mod (which overhauls the traffic simulator, in addition to a vast amount of content).
I’m picturing here the difference between Turing machines in the Game of Life that take place on a fixed area of the grid, vs. ones that attempt to just index out to whatever grid position they need, whether that causes wraparound or not.
For some games, like Minecraft (redstone) and Factorio (logic gates) it's easy, but for others it's difficult enough that you get to see some creativity. This is one of those latter instances.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_machine
In practice it's actually hard to make something with a potentially infinite memory that is not Turing complete.
If NOT is modeled by flooding a power plant and causing it to turn off, would it go back to being on after a while if we stop actively flooding it? Ie, If the input goes to 0, does the output go back to 1 or not? If this doesn't hold then it's not a proper NOT gate to begin with(turns 1 to 0 but doesn't turn 0 to 1) and the implementation is flawed.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4908893/what-logic-gates...
However, as the comments to the post say, the author should provide a proof that the "game physics" allows to construct a functioning latch from these logic gates.
Conditional loops are not essential: the lambda calculus is TC despite lacking any loop primitives.
Minecraft is not only turing complete, there are multiple complete projects of calculators and microcontrollers done using red stone.
"Quad Core Computer with Redstones" features things like cache, hardware stack, a gpu connected to a 15x15 display, serial input and output port and many other interesting things. Also it's available as download by the creator.
segment display: https://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=37902 (2008)
digital clock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkQBGJeh12U (2011)
binary adder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwWo9fL-GZs and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyEzm1ghAsU (2015)
In that vein, can you build logic gates out of cars and pedestrians?
