Whilst simulating the universe on an IM might be fun, I suspect that chaos theory would quickly rear its ugly head in any such model. After all, we already know that it's impossible to measure the conditions of this (or any other) universe precisely...
Of course, you could generate an infinite number of universes, some (infinite) subset of which would likely look like ours (although pattern-matching of universes could be a fun problem in and of itself). You then have the problem of choosing one which is both sufficiently like ours and which will remain so for a suitable period of time.
I do wonder if you'd end up with an effect akin to that of using genetic algorithms to program FPGAs. You'd get something that worked, but which was so intricately bound to strange and minute properties of its environment that it would be totally non-portable between universes.
Yeah, the important part of it would be designing selection criteria so that only a useful universe is presented for inspection. (Of course an infinite number of universes will meet any set of criteria, but that's fine - since they're all useful then just take the first.)
So, one criterion would be that a question is injected into any universe which contains things which appear to have intelligent characteristics, and the response would have to be something which could be parsed sensibly in this universe.
I think that chaos theory can be handled if you have infinite resources and a precise use case in mind.
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Of course, you could generate an infinite number of universes, some (infinite) subset of which would likely look like ours (although pattern-matching of universes could be a fun problem in and of itself). You then have the problem of choosing one which is both sufficiently like ours and which will remain so for a suitable period of time.
I do wonder if you'd end up with an effect akin to that of using genetic algorithms to program FPGAs. You'd get something that worked, but which was so intricately bound to strange and minute properties of its environment that it would be totally non-portable between universes.
So, one criterion would be that a question is injected into any universe which contains things which appear to have intelligent characteristics, and the response would have to be something which could be parsed sensibly in this universe.
I think that chaos theory can be handled if you have infinite resources and a precise use case in mind.