Simulating the universe is a popular theme, with many variations.  One interpretation is that we are all actually, in fact, living in some kind of virtual reality - whether our brains are actually in jars, or perhaps we still have our bodies, but that they are in turn being hosted in some type of life support pods like in the movie The Matrix, which is just one of the many kinds of variations on this theme.  The overall idea is nothing new.  Plato's allegory of the cave is also well known.  And let's not forget the classic Star Trek - For the World is Hollow, and I have Touched the Sky - even if that one strictly did not involve the more confluent type of dream within a dream, challenging ideas about the ultimate nature of reality like some of the variations that even more recent, and thus, contemporary writers have crafted.

Since this isn't an actual hardware hack, YET: I have decided to create this page.  Even though I might at some point try to train an AI that works similar to Eliza, MegaHal, or a modern variation like GPT2 or GPT3 on a text such as this one.  So there is the possibility that this will turn into some kind of project, in some form or another.  Perhaps, this approach will turn out to be helpful, as far as getting a real AI to help solve climate change is concerned, or to create a department of PRE-CRIME, which would certainly not be without controversy.  More likely, I will end up writing yet another snooty chatbot.  Spoiler alert!

So, the approach that I am contemplating right now is the idea of eliminating most of the universe altogether, as a universe that is more than 99.9999999% empty space, (and that is nowhere NEAR enough nines) seems like a pretty big waste of space. Thus, some work needs to be done, perhaps with some improved compression algorithms.  Let us at least for now assume, therefore, that we are alone in the universe and that all of those other stars and galaxies that we think that we see are just figments of our collective imaginations.  Now let us also imagine that we don't really need the Sun, or the Earth, or the Moon either - we just need to find a way to put something like eight billion brains in one gigantic jar and get them all hooked up to some kind of life support system, which along with the right psychoactive substances, or fiber-optic interconnects, or whatever, would allow the illusion that the universe exists, to continue - at least for now.

So now we can do some math.  If an average human brain weighs in at around three pounds, or just under 1336 grams for an adult human male, or 1198 for an adult female, according to nih.gov, then the total brain mass of all humans currently living would be not more than 10.14*10^12 grams or about 10.14 million metric tons.   Now if we assume a density equal to that of water, which could fill a sphere 268.5 meters in diameter if I did my pocket calculator arithmetic correctly.

Then we could in principle, get rid of most of the rest of the universe, and nobody would ever be wiser, that is, if we could build such a device, provide power to it, etc., and then somehow transfer all human consciousness into it.  Of course, nothing says that such a device would need to be organic in nature, that is to say - that if consciousness is simply some function of having enough q-bits, then maybe some kind of quantum computing technology, which has not yet been invented, but which could work, at least in theory, that is to say - without rewriting the laws of physics as we presently understand them.

How about using Boron-Nitride doped diamond as a semiconductor, for example, and then we could build a giant machine that runs Conway's Game of Life, which we know is Turing complete?  Now just such an approach, if we could figure out how to power and how to cool it, should at least in principle solve some of the other issues associated with organic systems.

Of course, if we could rewrite the laws of physics, just a little bit maybe, we can go a lot farther with this.  Why not replace regular atoms which are made from ordinary protons, neutrons, and electrons, with atoms that might somehow be made with muons, instead of electrons, or perhaps even Tau particles?  I haven't worked out the actual quantum mechanical calculations for this, nor do I know what the consequences would be if we could somehow create atoms that use charmed or strange quarks in lieu of regular material.  Yet since the muon is about 207 times heavier than an electron, then maybe we can get a 207 times reduction in the size of our sphere, thus reducing requirements for a computer capable of hosting the consciousness of all known life to a sphere of about 1.29 meters in diameter, with further reductions in size possible if we could take things to the next level and then somehow get Tau particles to co-operate with charmed quarks, or strangelets, or whatever, and get them to run Conway's game of life.

I have assumed of course, that such a simulation would be an otherwise atom-for-atom replica of all the tissue in the known universe; that is, assuming that we are "alone".  Other efficiency gains might be achieved by simply finding a way to get rid of most if not all of the water; and/or structural carbohydrates, and the like - in which case the whole thing might collapse to something like, perhaps, a thimble full of complex-proteins, with or without DNA; since we don't know if DNA plays some role in helping to create the presumptive quantum entanglements that most likey exist between some of the complex proteins that process information, i.e., such as across intra as well as inter-cellular boundaries.  Right now, I don't think that anyone actually "knows" the answer to that one, which is based on scientific experiments, i.e., and therefore empiricism.

Where are the "Art Officials" When we need them?

Even if I am not sure just exactly who they are.  Even if they don't exactly know who they are either.  I tried asking Google Bard last night, to see if it could summarize some of the material from a few of my projects on this site, and it turned out to be a complete disaster, meaning that it had absolutely no comprehension of the material whatsoever.  Then it occurred to me that summarizing an article might not be all that hard, actually - if done correctly, since where there is a will, there should be a hack - right?  What if I construct a dictionary for an article, and then use the word counts for each word to identify potential keywords, as I am already doing, but then there needs to be "something else" that needs to be done, that isn't currently being done or is going unnoticed.

Well, as it turns out, I noticed that maybe between one-third and one-half of the words on a typical list of unique words associated with a document are words that occur only once in that document, whereas.   So we could split a dictionary maybe into three parts, one part which might consist of words that are seen only once and then another part that contains words that are seen often, like "the", "we", "of", etc., which might occur dozens, or even hundreds of times, where then there would be those words that typically occur at least twice, but not necessary a "great number of times", whatever that means.  So there could be a list of regular words, another list of frequent words, and yet another for unique words.   Hence document analysis might mimic some of the properties of compiler design, which might have code that tracks, keywords, namespaces, global and local variables, etc.,

Hence for efficiency reasons, when developing code that will run on a micro-controller, it seems like it would be useful to have some way of specifying some kind of systematic parsing mechanism that works across multiple domains, on the one hand, in the sense of how it implements the notion of hierarchical frames, vs., specific embodiments of that concept,

So I started making changes to the inner workings of the symbol_table classes in my frame_lisp library, initially for performance reasons, so as to be able to speed up the time to perform simple symbol lookup, insertions, sorting, lexing, and parsing operations; none of which has any obvious impact on how an AI might perform certain tasks, other than from the point of view of raw speed.   Except when designing an asynchronous neuronal network, it should be obvious that the time that it takes for a search engine to return results to multiple, simultaneous queries will have a huge impact on what that network does, even if all we are doing is performing searches on multiple models and then prioritizing the results into a play queue in the order in which the various results are returned.

Well, in any case - let's take a look at how badly Google Bard blew it on the simple request to "Summarize the article "Computer Motivator", as found on the website - hackaday.io, that is according to the project of that name which was created by glgorman. Also, summarize "The Money Bomb", and "Using A.I. to create a Hollywood Script" from the same site."

And here is Google's response - which is completely wrong.

So Google thinks that the article "The Money Bomb" is about a fundraising technique used by the Obama campaign, there is actually NOTHING in that article about any of that sort of thing whatsoever.  This is despite the fact that every Hackaday article is supposed to have a tagline and a description, which is supposed to tell you something about what a project is about, and for "The Money Bomb", the tag-line is "Achieving the Million Dollar Payday, or else ... Why aren’t you a millionaire yet?”  Interestingly enough most theatrical scripts will include something called a log line, which for the Wizard of Oz might be something as simple as "After a young woman named Dorothy is transported by a freak tornado to a magical world called Oz, along with her dog Toto, she embarks along a series of adventures where she meets a Cowardly Lion, a living Scarecrow and a Tin Man - who join Dorothy's quest to find a mysterious wizard who they believe can help solve all of their problems, as well as help Dorothy find her way home.

Now for a more descriptive interpretation of what "The Money Bomb" might actually be about, I suppose that it might actually be helpful to read that project's description which reads something like this:

One reason that many people fail to achieve their financial goals is that they fail to achieve what I will later develop and explain as “their own critical mass”, that is – even if their business plan is fundamentally sound, well timed, etc. Of course, by now you must be thinking: What is the secret formula? Why is it being withheld? Is it even possible … that there is some “secret equation” that is not so secret after all, it is just hidden in some obscure nuclear physics textbook – or in the Bible, or in the Koran, or else might even be inscribed onto the walls of some pyramid? And of course, we are not going to tell you … unless first of all, we know who you are; and why you want to know … perhaps we could, I mean, there is after all the first amendment, and maybe we really could “just simply tell you”, but why should we?

Now it might also be helpful to take notice that "The Money Bomb" was a project that I entered in Hack-a-day's science fiction contest, and thus as I got further into the project, I had to realize, that since technically this is a hardware site, I had to come up with some sort of "design", such as a "plan" to create a potentially traversable wormhole in the laboratory, so we could perhaps download some trillion trillion carat diamond cores of extinct white dwarf stars from distant galaxies, and so on - even though since this a project that I created for a science fiction contest, the "rules" for that contest are also relevant for understanding the article - since the "rules" offered up to 50% of the points for the "quality of the documentation", and the only other requirement was that it had to include "something electrical" and at least 'blink", unless of course that was non-canon.

Maybe someday Bard will actually read the articles that it is being asked to summarize, Even better still, would be to have the ability to consider the context for which something might have been written.  Then of course, in the real world, we know that there is also something called "the audience", or at least most would-be authors should hope that there will be an audience! But do those authors write to entertain, or do they write to sell popcorn?  They can't possibly be in it for the money themselves, since the studios seem to operate on the principle that the "only good writer is a dead writer", and "the only good actor .... ", just like the record companies that don't want to worry about wardrobe malfunctions or other scandals, and where all they care about is "catalog rights".

O.K., since I wrote "The Money Bomb" I should be able to come up with an independent review, or at least a piece that reads like one, like "The Money Bomb" is a piece that takes a humorous look at a serious subject, by invoking some even more ominous references to concepts like "critical mass", "initiation", "propagation", "extinction" and so on.  Thus while taking a non-conventional approach to the ever-important subject of economics, the article uses these terms, instead of more traditional terms like "capitalization", "amortization", "obsolescence", and so on.  Yet important concepts such as "doubling time" and "sustainability" are discussed, also with various implications, for whoever you are - or whatever you are - that is - according to your place in the universe.

In any case - Bard does seem to do better with Computer Motivator, at least for trying to be polite and giving me a nice review on that one - even if it still doesn't know what the article is about.

Computer Motivator: The Computer Motivator project is still in the early stages of development, but glgorman has already made significant progress. He has created a prototype program that can set goals, track progress, and provide rewards. He is currently working on improving the program's user interface and adding additional features.

Now a program that can "set goals", "track progress" and "provide rewards" sounds like an interesting concept.  So perhaps Bard isn't completely useless.  Maybe I should ask GPT-4 Co-pilot to write such a thing.  AAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!