Artificial Code Execution in A Universal Simulation
Computer scientists and hobbyist hackers are using Machine learning, AI and old fashioned elbow grease to find flaws within software that allow them to inject instructions and subsequently execute them. Effectively, by performing seemingly mundane actions within a game, a user could write any software they choose, and execute it.
Elon Musk postulated that it’s much more likely that we as a species and everything we experience around us is a simulation—a highly advanced simulation, but nonetheless. To suggest something like this is serious. For the normal person, their entire life could go by and they would never notice anything was out of the ordinary. Their days come and go as they expect. However, to think that we may all be routines running on silicon would mean we exist in a world who’s fundamental physical laws are nothing but programmed variables. The world of computers is the most abstract and arbitrary, limited only by the human imagination. And even that may soon be in danger!
Hackers have even been able to create entire games within games. Take this centipede game, written and run within Super Mario Bros.
And Pong in Pokemon Emerald.
Flappy Bird in Super Mario Bros.
More modern games don’t have this done to them very often, possibly because the amount of code required to have an effect on the game may be large. Or maybe not. Why can’t a flaw be found where a piece of code could make a wall, or building—or enemy disappear? In some cases, an object’s entire existence, no matter how complex, is determined by a single on/off variable. Can some piece of code allow you to modify your avatar to become stronger? Could you just outright win the game? How about a change in the global variable that controls the acceleration of gravity, or the speed of light? In a computer there’s no real reason why anything must be the way it is.
If we do exist as characters (conscious, sentient entities) within a generated universe, it’s likely to be very advanced. Quantum computers are proving there is heavily parallel computation beyond binary. To say that a quantum computer may simulate a human-like consciousness within the next decade isn’t saying much. The thing with quantum computers, though: they don’t do digital computation very well. Some computer scientists propose that in the future we combine quantum processors with digital ones creating a hybrid unit. Large parallel and abstract computation would be done with the quantum processor, while display, basic input and output, etc, would be handled on the digital end of things. Thus, some of the universal simulation mechanics may be digital binary and it may be that this hybrid crossover is very near and dear to us as part of a brain or perceptual process that brings things from a quantum high-level down to a more understandable digital low-level. If this is the case, considering the sheer size of the universe, there is likely something, someplace, or things that can be done, that reveal flaws in the universal programming.
This flaw would allow intelligent entities (humans or other aliens) from within the program to modify it. This would be analogous to Mario reprogramming Super Mario Bros to give him access to the NES CPU. Of course Mario is not intelligent, but the player is. I wouldn’t bet on the simulation programmers sleeping well through the night expecting us to be only as intelligent as our biological brains allow us, either. As we create strong general AI that supersedes our own intelligence we will surely find out whether our world is “real” or not.