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[Loud Whispers]

it would get way to complex

You kidding? We haven't had a good Bay12 thought experiment since...

Well, as far as I know never. That leaves a niche.

[Mr S]

Toady has a PhD in Mathematics.  The player base is littered with EE's, ME's, CE's, MBA's, CPA's, BSE's, number geeks of all shapes and sizes, scientists of all flavor and many, many very intelligent younger players (a number of whom are well on their way to the upper percentiles of intellectual development).

The complexity level may not be for everyone, but it would hardly go over EVERYONE'S head.

Just sayin'   

[§¢ǿŗÞﵧ]

Toady has a PhD in Mathematics.  The player base is littered with EE's, ME's, CE's, MBA's, CPA's, BSE's, number geeks of all shapes and sizes, scientists of all flavor and many, many very intelligent younger players (a number of whom are well on their way to the upper percentiles of intellectual development).

The complexity level may not be for everyone, but it would hardly go over EVERYONE'S head.

Just sayin'   

you are right, let us start!

Other than us being in a simulation, there (as some of you might know) is another theory that arises from string theory. it says: that all the information in a volume of space can be encoded on the surface of the object that the volume is in. for example: when a black hole pulls an object into it, the information about the object gets spread on the surface of the black hole, with this information a person could recreate everything about the object (like a hologram). from this scientists think that the information about everything in the universe is spread out on the one dimensional surface of our universe. this means that everything in our universe might be a hologram.

[Loud Whispers]

Scientists think a lot of things. They also try to verify them

What you say is a logical argument, but is it reasonable to assume our universe is two dimensional? Well, we have a 3rd dimension to disagree. Allowing of course, our flawed perceptions, but still. Threee deeee.

[§¢ǿŗÞﵧ]

Scientists think a lot of things. They also try to verify them

What you say is a logical argument, but is it reasonable to assume our universe is two dimensional? Well, we have a 3rd dimension to disagree. Allowing of course, our flawed perceptions, but still. Threee deeee.

By "two dimensional" I mean the surface of our universe. The math of string theory (which if you tried to understand, without proper knowledge about quantum field theory, would make your brain explode) shows this to be true. (And also by "the surface of our universe" I mean the surface of the three dimensional membrane that we currently occupy according to string theory)

[GreatWyrmGold]

There is something more depressing about this too. with the creation of quantum computers, philosophers now think that there is a possibility that we might be living in a simulation. I know it sounds crazy but think about it carefully: If quantum computers have the potential to be this powerful, then it is possible they can create artificial intelligence in a simulation. And these computers also have the possibility to simulate entire universes.

I think it's conventional wisdom around here that our world has a good chance of being a DF (or equivalent) world where the dwarves and other sources of magic disappeared, like in the Age of Fairy Tales one sometimes reaches.

As to the math stuff: Couldn't the universe be the three-dimensional surface of a four-dimensional black hole?

[GoombaGeek]

philosophers now think that there is a possibility that we might be living in a simulation. I know it sounds crazy...

Heh, this has been common conceptual knowledge for a while now scorp

Philosophers and scientists are fond of thought experiments. Nothing new. Just a whole load of meta-maths. The future is just fun like that.

It's pronounced "scorth"

[Putnam]

philosophers now think that there is a possibility that we might be living in a simulation. I know it sounds crazy...

Heh, this has been common conceptual knowledge for a while now scorp

Philosophers and scientists are fond of thought experiments. Nothing new. Just a whole load of meta-maths. The future is just fun like that.

yup, there also are problems with this view, For example: pi has infinite digits so it would be impossible for quantum computers to calculate the exact value, but there HAS to be an exact value to pi.

Yeah, it's called pi. That's the exact value to pi. We simply can't display that number in any amount of digits.

[BFEL]

Well a number of thoughts arise on my end.
1. The file size would likely be around 1 or 2 terabytes in my opinion. Perhaps even less, as the human brain itself is only equipped with the equivalent of 1 terabyte of memory. However our memory works odd compared to that of computers.

2. The simulation concept is quite a fun one, and not entirely unreasonable, I have heard that someone once estimated that if all possible universes are composed of simulations then we are at worst around the 6th universe from the bottom. This was of course done using maths that I personally do not, nor have any intent to, understand, thus your mileage may vary.

3. I believe that string theory was recently disproven. Not entirely sure though, once again this is mostly hearsay but I figure I may as well point it out in case someone wants to add to it.

[Emily]

Honestly I don't think it would be that much bigger (bigger yes, but not THAT much.)

Or well, the saves would be about the same size, the engine would be closer to Skyrim or other similar games in terms of size, so that would be obviously a lot bigger, but not really bigger than Skyrim already is, since, the world generation mechanics are not actually all that large.

Keep in mind nearly everything in DF is procedurally generated.  You could make an engine to turn the exiting maps into terrain maps, then add rocks and trees and everything more or less like it already does, and generate most of it on the fly with a fixed seed and data in the existing world file.

Honestly I don't think there's anything stopping games like Skyrim from being this complex (I mean, see Daggerfall for comparison), they just choose not to be because they need a friendly learning curve and mass appeal to get the money they spent on making the game back.

[GreatWyrmGold]

How would Skyrim react if it had to display and store individual scars, missing teeth, broken nails, artifact decorations, etc? How could it remember the exact coordinates of each spatter of blood and vomit? How would it deal with injuries being crippling and healing on their own, how would it depict a goblin splatting on the ground while still depicting dwarves falling a z-level and just bruising their chest?

Giving Df good Skyrimesque graphics would probably take as much code as tbe rest of DF, plus several times the graphics coding of Skyrim.

[§¢ǿŗÞﵧ]

There is something more depressing about this too. with the creation of quantum computers, philosophers now think that there is a possibility that we might be living in a simulation. I know it sounds crazy but think about it carefully: If quantum computers have the potential to be this powerful, then it is possible they can create artificial intelligence in a simulation. And these computers also have the possibility to simulate entire universes.

As to the math stuff: Couldn't the universe be the three-dimensional surface of a four-dimensional black hole?

well... a black hole contains what is known as singularity in its center. Singularity is one dimensional (so a infinitely small dot) so if we did live in a black hole 1) time would go backwards and 2) we would be crushed to a point by hyper gravity.

[Putnam]

There is something more depressing about this too. with the creation of quantum computers, philosophers now think that there is a possibility that we might be living in a simulation. I know it sounds crazy but think about it carefully: If quantum computers have the potential to be this powerful, then it is possible they can create artificial intelligence in a simulation. And these computers also have the possibility to simulate entire universes.

As to the math stuff: Couldn't the universe be the three-dimensional surface of a four-dimensional black hole?

well... a black hole contains what is known as singularity in its center. Singularity is one dimensional (so a infinitely small dot) so if we did live in a black hole 1) time would go backwards and 2) we would be crushed to a point by hyper gravity.

...No.

Singularities are zero dimensional. Time doesn't really go backwards anywhere; in black holes, it either slows to a standstill or just ceases to exist.

[hops]

Y'know, I just realized that if such a thing exist Planewalked will insta-kill the FPS.
Then it'll become the Artifact of Doom.

[TKGP]

Code doesn't take up much space, resources do. Even if you have ten thousand goblins standing in a field, the save data just needs to know all their coordinates and conditions, and you only need to store one goblin texture/model to display them with, or a set of textures for separate body types and all that (along with smaller textures for scars, stumps and so on). Assuming the actual game mechanics stayed the same save size wouldn't really need to change, and then you just have to draw textures and make models for every tile type, item, creature, whatever else. I'm not saying it wouldn't be a fairly monumental undertaking given the sheer amount of detail in DF, but it's by no means undo-able.
The bigger concern would be writing a proper engine to handle all of our nonsense, but storage-wise machine code is pretty trivial.