I’ve started making my way (skeptically) through Ray Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind, and at the recommendation of a friend, I’ve also started keeping tabs on KurzweilAI, a Kurzweil-blessed site ...

The notion that we live as characters in someone else’s video game is irresistible to many, even outside of science fiction bookshelves. Googling the term “simulation hypothesis” returns numerous ...

A new research paper reframes the simulation hypothesis, asking whether reality could be simulated and what science can test.

We see countless stars and galaxies sparkling in the universe today, but how much matter is actually there? The question is simple enough — its answer, however, is turning out to be quite a ...

If such a simulation were possible, the simulated universe could itself give rise to life, which in turn might create its own simulation. This recursive possibility makes it seem highly unlikely that ...

Ever since Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom proposed his simulation argument in 2001, the nerdiverse has attempted to assess the possibility that reality is not really real, that what we experience as ...

When scientists push the limits of the world's most powerful supercomputers, they often find those limits are just the beginning of what's possible. In early November, the Department of Energy's ...

Let's say we build some ridiculous planet-sized computer — one so powerful it could simulate our entire universe. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here ...

The visible cosmos may contain roughly 6 x 10^80 — or 600 million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion — bits of information, according to a new estimate. The findings could have ...

If recent measurements of cosmic ray particles are correct, then we may have the first evidence that the universe as we know it is really a giant computer simulation. Humans have explored the laws of ...

For the past several years, a team of University of California astrophysicists working at Los Alamos National Laboratory have been using a cluster of roughly 300 computer processors to model some of ...