Creation

As I recall vaguely from physics (and I do cheat with a quick look at Wikipedia), a "Hamiltonian" is an operator commonly expressed as the sum of operators corresponding to the kinetic and potential energies of a system in the form

where those little carets over the letters indicate operators.  I recall a professor saying that if you had enough information, you could theoretically write a Hamiltonian operator that would describe the entire universe in terms of energy at the instant of the Big Bang, and predict the universe's precise evolution, right up to the present and beyond.  Maybe what God really said in Genesis, he joked, was "Let there be the Hamiltonian."

Just a little physics humor.   Some of you may still be reading.

I was reminded of the Hamiltonian by an article in this week's New Yorker about a British computer programmer named Sean Murray.  Mr. Murray has written something like a Hamiltonian for his own universe -- a computer game called No Man's Sky, soon to be released, apparently, by Sony.  His universe, available for exploration and exploitation by game players, will contain 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique planets.  Have fun, kids!

Unlike most computer games -- and electronic games is a subject I know very little about -- Murray's game does not use vast amounts of memory to contain all the information required to portray each of those 18 x 10¹⁸ planets.  Instead, his game contains a number of algorithms -- read the article, if you need more information -- that generate each planet as it is visited, and give the viewer a graphic representation of the planet based on its size, orbit, chemistry, and other knowable features.  Most planets will be lifeless.  Some will be inhabited by various life forms.  Some may have signs of past civilizations, just as in real science fiction.

The design allows for extraordinary economy in computer processing: the terrain for eighteen quintillion unique planets flows out of only fourteen hundred lines of code.  Because all the necessary visual information in the game is described by formulas, nothing needs to be rendered graphically until a player encounters it.

I suppose we are now drawing closer to the features of this "game" that I now find so irresistibly fascinating.

[T]he game continuously identifies a player's location, and then renders only what is visible.  Turn away from a mountain, an antelope, a star system, and it will vanish just as quickly as it appeared.  "You can get philosophical about it," Murray once said.  "Does that planet exist before you visit it?"

Indeed.

I'm not interested in hearing your psychiatric comments on my personality, but I'm often surprised that I can leave an object on a table overnight, and find it exactly where I left it the next morning.  How clever of the algorithms (although until now I hadn't thought to use this word), I think to myself, to enable it to be recreated -- exactly as I left it -- as I re-enter the room after a night's sleep!

I've posted before about scientists (of unknown competence) who suspect that we are characters in a computer game, and that the game will crash in the near future because our own digital profligacy will have exceeded the storage capacity of our creator's system.  This theory makes as much sense as any other cosmology that unaided reason can devise.  My own suspicion is that the star kid who started up the game of Earth got bored long ago and left it running while he went to get lunch.  But damn -- his game had a good programmer.  I can stare at my computer screen, casually turn my head away and look at something else, and then quickly look back at the screen.

It's still there, unchanged.  Or -- it was instantly recreated for my benefit, unchanged.

Murray admits that some of the planets his algorithms create are boring.  But even when they turn out to be boring, they're interesting to explore just because they are new and unknown.  I guess the first explorers of, say, Australia might have eventually become bored.  But they kept at it, not knowing what was apt to show up.  And as one of Murray's co-workers remarks about their game's universe, "It is a bit like it really does exist, isn't it?"

Murray, and we the human race, may be learning what it's like to be God the Creator.  Which is a fascinating thought.

Sure.  It's all fun and games (and money for Sony) right now.  But -- as the story of the Tower of Babel reminds us -- it probably won't end well.