Suppose you are writing a simulation. You keep optimizing it and hardcoding some stuff and handle different cases more efficiently and everything. One day your simulation becomes efficient enough so that you can run big enough grid for long enough, and there develops life. Then intelligent life. Then they tried to figure out the physics of their universe, and they succeed! But, oh wait, their description is extremely short but completely computationally intractable.
Can you say that they actually figured out in what kind of universe they are in already, or should you wait for when they discover another million lines of code of optimization for it? Should you create giant sparkling letters “congratulations, you figured that out” or wait for more efficient formulation?
The convergent reason to simulate a world is to learn what happens there. When to intervene with letters depends on, uh. Why are you doing that at all?
(Edit: I suppose a congratulatory party is in order when they simulate you back with enough optimizations that you can talk to each other in real time using your mutual read access.)
Suppose you are writing a simulation. You keep optimizing it and hardcoding some stuff and handle different cases more efficiently and everything. One day your simulation becomes efficient enough so that you can run big enough grid for long enough, and there develops life. Then intelligent life. Then they tried to figure out the physics of their universe, and they succeed! But, oh wait, their description is extremely short but completely computationally intractable.
Can you say that they actually figured out in what kind of universe they are in already, or should you wait for when they discover another million lines of code of optimization for it? Should you create giant sparkling letters “congratulations, you figured that out” or wait for more efficient formulation?
The convergent reason to simulate a world is to learn what happens there. When to intervene with letters depends on, uh. Why are you doing that at all?
(Edit: I suppose a congratulatory party is in order when they simulate you back with enough optimizations that you can talk to each other in real time using your mutual read access.)