Unfortunately trees can't reclaim co2 at the rate we release it though. Seems like supplementing that strategy with novel solutions like this makes sense.
That doesn't automatically mean that dictionaries are just as fast with hundreds of thousands or millions of keys. I don't know one way or the other, but it's conceivable that performance could degrade somewhat with large numbers of keys.
> Should any error [in the program] occur, the director could easily edit the states of any brains that have become aware of an anomaly before it spoils the simulation.
This seems really problematic to me. Why would you assume that a full-on universe simulator has a concept of a brain? If you're in the business of simulating the interactions of nanoparticles, having a "brain" object doesn't seem to make much sense. I suppose that you could implement some heuristic to identify minds with some degree of accuracy, but then you're getting into some weird territory. Someone wants to model the entire universe just to observe life here on earth? Why assume the author of this system is even aware of us at all?
> It could be the case that one planetary civilisation is all that can be simulated, without running into computational capacity issues.
Again, why would a system like this be optimized toward the civilisation level?
The idea is cool, maybe probable, but this write up seems pretty fanciful.
Personally, before I decide to try something like this I would be interested to know how the app collects data from the user. I participated in https://www.trackyourhappiness.org/. If you aren't familiar, it surveys you multiple times per day (it was configurable I think). The survey's were short. At first I was happy to do it, but over time the surveys got more and more annoying to the point where I stopped doing them altogether. It got too annoying for me personally before I completed enough surveys for them to compile a full profile for me. Has this app improved upon the data collection process at all?
The whole time I read that article I told myself that it will be different for me. The whole time I also knew it won't be different for me. Maybe denial can be a good thing?