> [...] but it presupposes that there is a theory of everything that can be used to perfectly simulate the universe, [...]

LLMs are nice here: we don't need a theory of everything to simulate them. You can indeed use pebbles on the beach.

Scott Aaronson said that in theory a finite look-up table can win eg a ten minute Turing test (any finite length is fine). Of course, to borrow his argument further, the naive table would be galactic in size. So the real magic is in being able to compress the responses of that table into something human sized / LLM-server sized.

> but it presupposes that there is a theory of everything that can be used to perfectly simulate the universe, and I'd like to remind everybody that we still don't know whether such a thing exists

Is it even possible that a complete simulation of the rules of this universe (let alone the content of it) could exist in this universe?

I am no expert but I did manage to read most of GEB [0] so I feel fully qualified to say that it feels like something Gödel would have opinions about?

[0] the honest nerd's "did sleep in a Holiday Inn last night"

Thank you for the link to the post. It was a fascinating read and also entertaining.

After seeing the story of the fruit fly brain simulation I figured stuff like the nematode would be trivial.

The lack of active plasticity in LLMs causes a lot of frustration imo. Having agents make the same mistakes over and over and not be able to correct course without prompt engineering is the biggest symptom.

Obviously a static mind is more helpful from a performance perspective, especially if you consider model deployments into gateware.

Maybe this will be an inherent limitation to LLMs that won’t be solvable without a new approach.

I would argue that for the situation of the comic to occur, it's only necessary to have a theory of everything that's sufficiently good to simulate a universe that's close enough to ours that it's hard to notice the difference.