Assuming our simulation is not designed to auto-scale (and our Admins don’t know how to download more RAM), what kind of side effects could we see in the world if the underlying system hosting our simulation began running out of resources?
Simply put.
We wouldn’t notice anything.
Our perception of the world would be based only on the compute cycles and not on any external time-frame.
The machine could run at a Million Billion hertz or at one clock-cycle per century and your perception of time inside the machine would be the same.
Same with low ram, we would have no indication if we were constantly being paged out to a hard drive and written back to ram as required.
Greg Egan gave a great explanation of this in the opening chapter of his Novel Permutation City
Clearly wrong .
Running out of ram happen all the time. We see something, store it, and that something also gets stored in ram. But if that second storage gets reaped by the oom, the universe reprocess it.
Since it’s already in our copy, it cause weird issues. We call it Déjà Vu!
We can see that already when something approaches the speed of light: time slows down for it.
This simplification horribly misunderstands what time-dilation is, and I love it.
I have a running theory that that’s also what’s going on with quantum physics, because I understand it so poorly that it just seems like nonsense to me. So in my head, I see it as us getting into some sort of source code we’re not supposed to see, and on the other side some programmers are going “fuck I don’t know, just make it be both things at once!” and making it up on the fly.
An automatic purge process will start to prevent this. It happened several times in the past. Last time between 2019-2022. It removed circa 7 million processes. With regular purges like this it is made sure that the resources are not maxed out before the admins can add more capacity.
Data in memory will be offloaded to swap space. I doubt we’d notice any fluctuations since we’re part of the simulation, but externally it could slow to a crawl and basically be useless. They might shut it down, hopefully just to refactor. But again we probably wouldn’t notice any downtime, even if it’s permanent.
Not sure you’ve experienced the end of many SimCity games if you think this is the case. 😂
If anything, the earth lately kinda feels like someone’s gotten bored with the game.
iirc this is a plot point in the book “Fall; or, Dodge in Hell” by Neal Stephenson (sequel to Reamde). At some point the virtual world slows to a crawl so much that people outside of it cannot really track what is going on but it’s transparent to those inside the world. I might be misremembering exactly how it was implemented.
Maybe we’re already there and death is just the garbage collector freeing up more space.
