Before you build that, just to practice your skills you can build some code that will take a blurry picture and with extremely high accuracy show what the picture would have looked like had the camera been in focus.
The problem with that program is that the information was already there. The information may have been scattered in a semi-random pattern, but it was still there to be reorganized. In this hypothetical simulation, there is a lack of information. And while you can undo randomization to recreate a blurred image, you cannot create information from nothing.
However, the human brain does have some interesting traits which might make it possible for humans to think they are seeing something without creating all the information such a thing would possess. The neocortex has multiple levels. Lower levels detect things like absence and presence of light, which higher levels turn into lines and curves, which even higher levels turn into shapes, which eventually get interpreted as a specific face (the brain has clusters of a few hundred neurons responsible for every face we have memorized). All you would have to do to make a human brain think they saw someone would be to stimulate the top few hundred neurons, the bottom ones need not be given information. Imagine a general telling his troops to move somewhere. Each troop carries out an action, tells their superior, who gives their superior a generalization, who gives their superior a generalization, until the general gets one message “Move going fine”. To fool the general (human) into thinking the move is going fine (interacting with something), you don’t need to forge the entire chain of events (simulate every quark), you just need to give them the message saying everything is going great (stimulate those few hundred neurons). And then when the matrix person looks closer, the Matrix Lords just forge the lower levels temporarily.
The problem with this is is it does not match the principle “Humans simulating old earth to get information”. It would not be giving the future humans any new information they hadn’t created, because they would have to fake that information. They wouldn’t learn anything. It is possible to fool humans in that way, but the only possible use would be for the purpose of fooling someone. And that would require some serious sadism. So there is a scenario in which humans have the computational power and algorithms to make you live in a simulation you think is real, but have no reason to do so.
The original hypothetical was to create a simulated agent that merely fails to notice a gap. New information does not need to be added for this; information from around the gap merely needs to be averaged out to create what appears to be not-a-gap (much as human sight doesn’t have a visible hole in the blind spot).
Now, if the intent was to cover the gap with something specific, then your argument would apply. If, however, the intent is to simply cover up the gap with the most easily calculated non-gap data, then it becomes possible to do so. (Note that it may still remain possible, in such circumstances, to discover the gap indirectly).
This has now been done—to a first approximation, at least.
The problem with that program is that the information was already there. The information may have been scattered in a semi-random pattern, but it was still there to be reorganized. In this hypothetical simulation, there is a lack of information. And while you can undo randomization to recreate a blurred image, you cannot create information from nothing.
However, the human brain does have some interesting traits which might make it possible for humans to think they are seeing something without creating all the information such a thing would possess. The neocortex has multiple levels. Lower levels detect things like absence and presence of light, which higher levels turn into lines and curves, which even higher levels turn into shapes, which eventually get interpreted as a specific face (the brain has clusters of a few hundred neurons responsible for every face we have memorized). All you would have to do to make a human brain think they saw someone would be to stimulate the top few hundred neurons, the bottom ones need not be given information. Imagine a general telling his troops to move somewhere. Each troop carries out an action, tells their superior, who gives their superior a generalization, who gives their superior a generalization, until the general gets one message “Move going fine”. To fool the general (human) into thinking the move is going fine (interacting with something), you don’t need to forge the entire chain of events (simulate every quark), you just need to give them the message saying everything is going great (stimulate those few hundred neurons). And then when the matrix person looks closer, the Matrix Lords just forge the lower levels temporarily.
The problem with this is is it does not match the principle “Humans simulating old earth to get information”. It would not be giving the future humans any new information they hadn’t created, because they would have to fake that information. They wouldn’t learn anything. It is possible to fool humans in that way, but the only possible use would be for the purpose of fooling someone. And that would require some serious sadism. So there is a scenario in which humans have the computational power and algorithms to make you live in a simulation you think is real, but have no reason to do so.
The original hypothetical was to create a simulated agent that merely fails to notice a gap. New information does not need to be added for this; information from around the gap merely needs to be averaged out to create what appears to be not-a-gap (much as human sight doesn’t have a visible hole in the blind spot).
Now, if the intent was to cover the gap with something specific, then your argument would apply. If, however, the intent is to simply cover up the gap with the most easily calculated non-gap data, then it becomes possible to do so. (Note that it may still remain possible, in such circumstances, to discover the gap indirectly).