Terence Tao

But it just may take enormous effort, like if you collect more and more data, and it keeps pointing to a different hypothesis that the universe is real, you know, whoever's doing the simulation will have to keep faking more and more data to consistently do a completely different outcome.

And at some point, it's just why would they go through so much effort?

Yeah, so it seems like if the universe was a simulation, whoever designed it has great attention to detail.

Yes.

At really fine scales or something, you still see the same laws of physics that you see.

It's not like a cheaply made movie where once you're out of a shot or something, everything's all made of cardboard.

It wasn't made by a lazy simulator.

It was made by a very obsessive simulator, if it was.

This is the first time I've ever heard the simulator complimented.

The world is feeling less real these days, I think, just because there's so much simulated everything, unfortunately.

Yes, it is.

As I said, anything's possible in a simulation.

There you go.

Well, I mean, in your undergraduate education, you learn about the really hard impossible problems, like the Riemann hypothesis, the twin-primes conjecture.

You can make problems arbitrarily difficult.

That's not really a problem.

In fact, there's even problems that we know to be unsolvable.

What's really interesting are the problems just on the boundary between what we can do perfectly easily and what are hopeless.

But what are problems where existing techniques can do like 90% of the job and then you just need that remaining 10%?

I think as a PhD student, the Kakeya problem certainly caught my eye, and it just got solved, actually.