« This seems like a bad idea when the laws of physics as far as we can tell don’t seem to allow you to simulate n particles interacting with fewer than n particles. »
Hum, it does allow it, if you are allowed to take some precision loss/uncertainity. You can’t simulate exactly n particles with fewer than n particles, but if you’re allowed to make some mistakes, to lose some information you can gain a lot in term of “simulated particles”/”real particles” ratio. And somehow, quantum mechanics does look like it loses precision, throw dices, do “lossy compression” and then estimate probabilities to get us back a result. (That’s if you forget about Many Worlds, but I don’t think a simulation would run Many Worlds). When see the laws of QM, it somehow feels like the kind of quirks I could make in implementing a simulator (and relativity, by limiting the interactions to near objects, would allow to split the computing over a cluster efficiently). But that’s just a wild thought, I didn’t take the time (yet) to really ponder it much.
When see the laws of QM, it somehow feels like the kind of quirks I could make in implementing a simulator
It feels like it, but if anything it’s the opposite. It’s my experience that many people on the border between CS and physics have this thought. However, it’s actually much harder to simulate quantum systems than classical systems, and in fact quantum simulation is one of the reasons physicists are interested in quantum computers. (Other people are interested in other problems that quantum computers can do better than classically.)
« This seems like a bad idea when the laws of physics as far as we can tell don’t seem to allow you to simulate n particles interacting with fewer than n particles. »
Hum, it does allow it, if you are allowed to take some precision loss/uncertainity. You can’t simulate exactly n particles with fewer than n particles, but if you’re allowed to make some mistakes, to lose some information you can gain a lot in term of “simulated particles”/”real particles” ratio. And somehow, quantum mechanics does look like it loses precision, throw dices, do “lossy compression” and then estimate probabilities to get us back a result. (That’s if you forget about Many Worlds, but I don’t think a simulation would run Many Worlds). When see the laws of QM, it somehow feels like the kind of quirks I could make in implementing a simulator (and relativity, by limiting the interactions to near objects, would allow to split the computing over a cluster efficiently). But that’s just a wild thought, I didn’t take the time (yet) to really ponder it much.
It feels like it, but if anything it’s the opposite. It’s my experience that many people on the border between CS and physics have this thought. However, it’s actually much harder to simulate quantum systems than classical systems, and in fact quantum simulation is one of the reasons physicists are interested in quantum computers. (Other people are interested in other problems that quantum computers can do better than classically.)