Can the big bang be compared to how video games start?

[CynicusRex]

If I understand correctly, when we interpret our data about the universe it seems the big bang came from nothing and threw out everything.

Is it reasonable to compare this to a video game? Games also start from nothing and have suddenly loaded everything. If the game's AI was able to analyze the data of their phenomena, wouldn't they too conclude that their universe appears to have come from nothing?

A cherry on top: if our universe is a video game, couldn't it be that we are the enemy AI that the player must defeat.

 

[member 656954]

If a game AI was sufficiently (self)aware to both interrogate its environment and understand their 'creation', you can decide anything you like about what they might conclude. But I'd expect some degree of curiosity would be required for the AI to even trigger this line of thinking. The AI would also need a sense of time, so that the 'past' is a concept warranting exploration. And the AI would need to develop a framework to execute something like the scientific method to iterate its ideas into a complete theory. Finally (for this post anyway, other aspects will likely occur later), the AI requires sufficient flexibility of code to even allow it to 'think' along these lines.

Presumably, the AI needs to do all of its thinking in a single execution of the game, because while the game state is saved, the executing code would 'big bang' each time the user starts the program.

 

[DavidSnider]

A video game universe is essentially what it would be like if solipsism were true.

The universe is created on the fly the for a single observer and as soon as any part of that universe is no longer observable to that observer it ceases to exist.

 

[mfb]

Video games are more like last Thursdayism becoming real. An AI in the game cannot come to the conclusion that the universe must be new in all video games I could think of. For all the in-game AI can know the in-game universe could have existed for a much longer time.

This is different from our universe, where we can look at the current status and determine that it was very different 13.8 billion years ago.

 

[some bloke]

I guess, however, that a game which would run a simulation of the universe from the start would have potential, if it were a complex enough program, for the entities within it to observe the simulation and see that it all started somewhere.

If this were a simulation, however, we would have bugs in the code, such as things behaving like waves or particles depending on if they are being observed, or factors limited by the programming speed, like a finite limit on the speed of data transfer.

It's quite a cool concept for a plot. Imagine if the characters on a game become sentient, and are afforded rights, and the repercussions of it. Especially as they would be advancing waaay faster than us (to reach this point since their simulation started).

 

[mfb]

Here is an interesting story exploring such a concept