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The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004)

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Re: The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004)

#21

Post by qingcharles »

bsza wrote: post #20

If the laws and initial state of the universe can be expressed in few enough bits, then all you need to store is a title and a date. Run a simulation of the universe, fast forward to the date the movie was released, use an AI to find a theater playing it, and digitize the tape. It may take longer to run than the current age of the universe, but eventually you’ll get it.

I've thought about this a lot over the years. What you're asking is, can we accurately emulate our own universe inside our own universe at greater than 100% speed? If so, it would allow us to build a type of space-time machine where we could visit any location at any time.

I don't think it is totally inconceivable. It is definitely possible that there are hacks such as compression that would allow a simulator to run at above 100% speed. It also might not need to be 100% accurate -- we might find that running below that threshold still produces an output that is practically indistinguishable from the real events, yet allows it to run.

Re: The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004)

#22

Post by qingcharles »

tzs wrote: post #16

A little OT: do the information theory based proofs of limits on how effective compression can be also prove that backwards time travel is impossible? If backwards time travel were possible then your "compression algorithm" could simply be deleting the file. To recover the file go back in time to before it was deleted and make a copy. With this you can "compress" giant files down to just a short description of a plac…

Backwards time travel is perfectly possible, but perhaps not in our actual reality, but in a simulation of our universe, which would get you the data you want.

Re: The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004)

#23

Post by FFP999 »

karmakaze wrote: post #12
daveguy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How about we get GPT to turn good movies into great books? Like a large inverse prompt engineering problem. GPT has trouble making great sentences, much less great books from a data type completely different from its training. GPT, at the core, is a "likely next word" generator. No great literature came as a process of "likely next word" in a vacuum. Likely next word from complex experiences of a decade and plot de…

What is the limiting factor though? I could make a bad sketch and get a description of that used to render a better picture right? We currently don't optimize for this as a goal so could get better, no?

And how would you train a fitness function to recognize book goodness? It's inherently subjective.

Re: The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004)

#24

Post by eternityforest »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #11

I once had an idea for a file transfer system based on digits of pi that sounds the same as this idea. You'd give everybody DVDs of digits of pi (or they could calculate them themselves) , and then transfer files faster by just sending them the offset into pi. At the time I thought it could work with a big enough bank of digits of PI on both sides. If transfer was expensive, and calculating digits was cheap then you…

Neural network encoding seems like the closest thing to that idea that's actually practical.

Re: The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004)

#26

Post by RetroTechie »

daveguy wrote: post #10
karmakaze wrote: post #8

> The whole problem of Pieper's way of thinking (and of every other person who believes that Sloot actually could compress movies with a factor of two million) is that he believes that the key does not need to contain every detail of a movie. Unfortunately, it does. I wonder if one was scammed and bought a Blu-ray with everything, only to find out they got novels rather than movies. After the initial disappointment t…

> How about we get GPT to turn good movies into great books? Like a large inverse prompt engineering problem. GPT has trouble making great sentences, much less great books from a data type completely different from its training. GPT, at the core, is a "likely next word" generator. No great literature came as a process of "likely next word" in a vacuum. Likely next word from complex experiences of a decade and plot de…

What should be doable:

Deconstruct a movie into a set of 3D models, textures, voices, parameters for those 3D models' movement, procedural generation of background objects like trees, grass, sea, sand, weather conditions, etc, etc. Like the data that forms the content of modern, near-photorealistic games.

A game engine-like rendering system would then render a scene, tweak parameters until rendered scene / frames match the original movie closely, and work through the rest of the movie the same way.

When done, one could produce derivations of such movie by changing actors' voices, have them move differently or speak in another language, swap out buildings or other objects, reduce polygon count or resolution of textures, have a cornfield show a little taller stalks, put the sun in a different angle, etc, etc.

Of course this is way beyond current compute capabilities. Not to mention software frameworks to do this job. But in theory this should work. For a 2min trailer it would probably be pointless. But for a 2..3h movie, maybe not.

And yes, of course this would be lossy 'compression'. Just more high-level than current video compression schemes.

For an audio analogy: compare mp3 compression with MIDI + quality sound banks for every instrument under the sun + parameters like how hard a piano key was struck, etc. Vary such high-level parameters until rendered output matches the original music.

Re: The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004)

#27

Post by [deleted] »

tzs wrote: post #16

A little OT: do the information theory based proofs of limits on how effective compression can be also prove that backwards time travel is impossible? If backwards time travel were possible then your "compression algorithm" could simply be deleting the file. To recover the file go back in time to before it was deleted and make a copy. With this you can "compress" giant files down to just a short description of a plac…

[deleted]

Re: The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004)

#28

Post by granularity »

refulgentis wrote: post #25

Isn't this trivially false, way before atoms, Turing machines, and any other drive-by namedrops I missed? Given the notch = (A+B) / 10 You can only recover A + B. You can't recover A or B individually.

I read “attaches all these numbers to each other” to mean concatenation, not addition. Presumably you’d want to encode a “next book” token too. This kind of compression is known as arithmetic coding. It does work.

Re: The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004)

#29

Post by bsza »

qingcharles wrote: post #21
bsza wrote: post #20

If the laws and initial state of the universe can be expressed in few enough bits, then all you need to store is a title and a date. Run a simulation of the universe, fast forward to the date the movie was released, use an AI to find a theater playing it, and digitize the tape. It may take longer to run than the current age of the universe, but eventually you’ll get it.

I've thought about this a lot over the years. What you're asking is, can we accurately emulate our own universe inside our own universe at greater than 100% speed? If so, it would allow us to build a type of space-time machine where we could visit any location at any time. I don't think it is totally inconceivable. It is definitely possible that there are hacks such as compression that would allow a simulator to run…

> I don't think it is totally inconceivable

You could create a kind of "reverse" grandfather paradox by preventing future events predicted by the simulation from happening. Perhaps it could run fine up to the point that it has to simulate itself, then it would slow down to the point of becoming useless.

Re: The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004)

#30

Post by sdfsdfsfds »

granularity wrote: post #28
refulgentis wrote: post #25

Isn't this trivially false, way before atoms, Turing machines, and any other drive-by namedrops I missed? Given the notch = (A+B) / 10 You can only recover A + B. You can't recover A or B individually.

I read “attaches all these numbers to each other” to mean concatenation, not addition. Presumably you’d want to encode a “next book” token too. This kind of compression is known as arithmetic coding. It does work.

The standard theoretical technique for encoding a list of numbers as a single number is Gödel encoding. It can be applied as many times as you like—e.g. to encode a list of lists of numbers, or a list of lists of lists of numbers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_numbering
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