Asklemmy

1454 readers

59 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

If we all exist in a simulation, what will happen once we start running out of RAM? (lemm.ee)

submitted 9 months ago by aCosmicWave@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

40 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Assuming our simulation is not designed to auto-scale (and our Admins don’t know how to download more RAM), what kind of side effects could we see in the world if the underlying system hosting our simulation began running out of resources?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Pons_Aelius@kbin.social 39 points 9 months ago

Simply put.

We wouldn't notice anything.

Our perception of the world would be based only on the compute cycles and not on any external time-frame.

The machine could run at a Million Billion hertz or at one clock-cycle per century and your perception of time inside the machine would be the same.

Same with low ram, we would have no indication if we were constantly being paged out to a hard drive and written back to ram as required.

Greg Egan gave a great explanation of this in the opening chapter of his Novel Permutation City