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elcritch • today at 12:23 AM • 5 replies • view on HN

Wowzers!

This also reaffirms my (wishful) thinking that if there’s a way to do FTL communication it’ll be something with an absurdly tiny factor like 2^-182 with a slight asymmetry in a probability somewhere.

Then you’re not violating FTL, just gaining a very slight chance that you might know something FTL – probably.


Replies

hgoel • today at 12:29 AM

Given that c is the speed of causality itself, FTL communications would effectively be like predicting the future.

From that angle, beating light speed by some absurdly tiny factor would probably correspond to a means of predicting the future at some almost absurdly tiny factor better than random guessing.

Edit: Actually...it doesn't make sense to call this FTL communication, it's just predicting the future state of a system given some previous state. FTL comms would have to be predicting the future state of a system without information about the previous state.

Practically speaking predictive modeling would be a means of compensating for light speed comms, kind of like branch prediction in processors or speculative decoding in LLMs, but that wouldn't actually be FTL comms.

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saagarjha • today at 12:41 AM

If there was a way to do FTL communications you’d expect that Jane Street would have found it already

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CaptainNegative • today at 3:37 AM

Are time and distance, and consequently velocity, even well defined enough at that level of precision on any physical scale?

binlog • today at 1:25 AM

That would only mean we calculated c wrong

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psychoslave • today at 3:06 AM

What's FTL?

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