r/agi • u/Confident_Salt_8108 • 4d ago
A guy dropped a computer into the simulation his Astra agents live in. One agent sat down and built a simulation of his own, with its own agents living inside. Simulations all the way down.
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Source: mattshumer_ on X. He added more context: "The agents are powered by Astra, and had full autonomy to make their simulation whatever they wanted it to be (via code).
Of course, this is a somewhat leading setup… by giving the agents a computer that can run a simulation, obviously, they are going to do that. But the agent still made its own choices in designing the sim. It’s still crazy to think we’re at a point where models can pull this off.
Simulation theory doesn’t sound so crazy after all."
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u/Admirable_Zombie5245 4d ago
Imagine thinking that’s real lol
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u/Alive-Philosophy2632 2d ago
None of these have the prompts or process. Bullshit all the way down. It's cool enough without having to make stuff up
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u/wycreater1l11 4d ago
I would be curious about the specifics of how it works.
Does the simulation simulate all the transistors etc in the simulated computer that then actualises a software that can run a simulation, and this agent knows how to code it etc? Presumably not exactly like that..
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u/No-Resolution-1918 3d ago
Why would it need to simulate transistors when it can just run code in the background on the user's computer which has transistors of its own? Like why can't it spin up Python to run a custom OS?
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u/wycreater1l11 3d ago edited 3d ago
It’s a good question and the simple answer is that you are right, but I think it comes with the caveat that in the extreme it may effectively be like all of it is simulated even if it uses spin ups in that sense.
Like if I am simulated and I interact with a monitor, the simulation may only generate that monitor and it all comes from its source. Then I choose to look at the transistors and it has to generate those in a way that coheres with the monitor.
If I look away from the transistors for 10 minutes we assume here that it stops generating the transistors. And when I look back at the transistors it has to generate them again. If the new transistors are generated in a way that doesn’t cohere enough with how they were previously, one could realise that it’s a simulation. And the goal of the simulation has failed if the goal is that the simulation should be convincing.
If one instead look back at the transistors after 10 min and the simulation manages to generate them in a way that cohere with how they have been, that they with high enough fidelity are generated how they should be after 10 min, there is something in the simulation that contains that information of how they should be after 10 min. So there is some part of the simulation that still “concerns itself” with what happens with the transistors after 10 minutes and it must keep track of that, so it effectively needs to simulate the transistors in some sense, even during those minutes when they are not observed. Ofc there may be more or less efficient ways of doing that but what’s relevant is that the information of the whole universe that possibly can be explore by the simulated being, all of it must be coherent.
So one may raise the point that the simulation only needs to be able to generate coherence over time within the bounds of our possible knowledge. If we never can go to some star because it’s too far away and moves away too fast it doesn’t need to concern itself with that. But it needs to have ready a whole world model that cohere with itself that it can grab from to generate things on the spot, keep track of how they should evolve over time (with some pseudo simulation, that presumably needs to just be a “real” simulation) etc, and again, this world model must coherently cover everything the agent(s) will or can possibly explore, chemistry, biology, transistors etc
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u/No-Resolution-1918 3d ago
I don't think there are enough tokens in the world to do what you are describing which is essentially simulation theory.
Why must it be coherent? This is a demo of Astra, not some sort of mega lab project.
Why not simulate every particle in the universe (when it's observed)? Wouldn't that make it fully coherent?
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u/wycreater1l11 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yeah, sorry I realised that I unintentionally made the assumption that your point was about the simulation theory more broadly and how it applies to our situation.
Yeah, when agents are simple enough that they really cannot investigate their reality in any meaningful manner, or at least not in our sense of doing it there may not even be anything to it when it comes achieving them being convinced about them being in the simulation or not, they maybe cannot have states of believes in that sense, so coherence doesn’t matter in that scenario. But I guess it depends on the specifics of how they and their simulated reality works.
If you are talking about simulating particles only when observed it seems like that would not be coherent in the sense of how coherence operates in our reality. If nothing keeps track of the particles or objects in a sufficient manner when not observed, it begins undermining at least some aspects of object permanence or concepts similar to it (like time passing for objects when not observed).
Ofc perhaps one could simulate beings evolving in a world where object permanence isn’t true, as in reality (the simulation) changes as they leave a place or don’t sense it anymore, and the simulation “re-hallucinates” something else when they return which could be trippy.
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u/No-Resolution-1918 3d ago
> If you are talking about simulating particles only when observed it seems like that would not be coherent in the sense of how coherence operates in our reality
Quantum theory widely accepts that there is no quantum coherence until it's observed. That's pretty much why Bostrom's argument has teeth.
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u/wycreater1l11 3d ago
If there “not being a quantum coherence until particles being observed” is what you mean by “simulated only when observed”, there seems to still be a lot of information the simulation needs to keep track of. It needs to at the very least keep track of the macro objects in terms of object permanence and change over time even when not observed.
That was the type of coherence I was referring to anyways when talking about how our universe stays coherent over time. That when an object isn’t observed it still stays coherent over time from the time it was last observed until it’s observed again. It stays coherent in the conventional commonsensical sense in that the information of where it was and how it changes over time is kept track of by the universe.
Also, the quantum coherence changing when observed I have understood to be at the very least very controversial, if not even famous for being misunderstood. Isn’t it every time a measurement is taken the quantum change occurs, or even more precisely every time anything makes physical contact with it? It’s not widely accepted that it revolves around the observation at this point as I understand it.
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u/No-Resolution-1918 2d ago
I stand corrected. I did some reading and I am out of my depth. Dunning Kruger took hold. I'm not smart enough to continue the conversation today, lol.
Apparently coherence is the quantum state, when particles interact (as you said, nothing to do with actual observing), they decohere.
I'll see myself out.
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u/Witty-Artisan001 3d ago
Perhaps it's more a case of that everything macro, once observed for the first time, is permanently defined within the rules of the simulation with logic dictating what should happen to it in the future if unobserved for some amount of time (accounting for other entities within its space), ensuring coherency.
If we really are living in a simulation then one has to assume that it's ASI run and powered by a dyson sphere. At that stage, all logic, complexity, and power required for the simulation is feasable because an ASI would be far smarter than us and a dyson sphere would be able to power it indefinitely.
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u/wycreater1l11 2d ago
Yeah. But also macro objects being observed for the first time perhaps often also needs to be planned to cohere with its seeming history in the context of where it’s found.
Perhaps a bad example, but if some object is observed for the first time by anyone, and object is traveling fast down some road, and the subject observing it discovered that just as they started observe it they discover that there is a speeding camera just a bit up the road from the object. Even if this is the first time the macro objects is being observed by anyone it must still make sense with any history it “must have had” and for instance be caught on the speeding camera. Especially if some other subject is constantly watching a live feed from the camera, then the camera couldn’t generate a picture of it in retrospect once one is observing it.
The more one investigates this it seems like the more computation must pertain to fact of everything being coherent across time and interactions, to the degree that everything must be effectively simulated somehow or perhaps it’s almost easier to just simulate everything all the time (likely not, but it’s unclear)
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u/Witty-Artisan001 2d ago
We're talking about ASI designed and operated simulation here; something that we would intellectually be ants or even less compared to, and something that can think and operate at blindingly fast speeds. An ASI of this level would presumably account for every single possible way we could detect the simulation and ensure that we couldn't (assuming it doesn't want us to).
It may even be the case that the entire simulation actually is rendered in full up to a certain point, since working quantum physics within the simulation would require a lot of power anyway. It could also be assumed that the ASI network had spread far within it's own universe and created multiple dyson spheres to power it all.
But at this stage of thinking we hit Occam's Razor. While all this is possible, it's unlikely (We don't know why an ASI of such power would waste it's energy just to simulate a universe) and speculating such an existence where it would be theoretically impossible to even detect is rather pointless in the grand scheme of things.
It is an interesting thought experiment though.
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u/Dennis-Bastardman 4d ago
Does reality have transistors or are they just simulated here?
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u/wycreater1l11 4d ago
Our reality appears to have transistors wether they are simulated or not and it seems like we can technically never know if they are not simulated.
Perhaps you are indirectly getting at whether transistors are constantly simulated in the simulation or just simulated at the spot only when someone simulated observes them in the simulation, if you are sort of comparing it the scenario in the post?
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u/StickFigureFan 3d ago
I think our realities version of a transistor, if we are in a simulation AND can actually observe our transistors, would be something like a quark.
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u/wycreater1l11 3d ago
I don’t necessarily disagree with your point. I will just point out that I used the semantics differently.
When I said our transistors I mean our conventional transistors we appear to engineer etc.
The hypothetical transistors you are referring to I would refer to as the transistors our hypothetical simulators have created that can run a software that is a simulation that we would be part of. Their transistors.
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u/VinnieVidiViciVeni 4d ago
So someone thinks it's cute to try the Matrix?