Posts

Es werden Posts vom Dezember, 2017 angezeigt.

My Reading List 2017

In 2017, I have bought a lot of books. This is only an excerpt from the complete list: 1. Turings Kathedrale (George Dyson, 2012). Original title: Turing's Cathedral. A book about computers, especially about the early days when people such as Alan Turing and John Von Neumann were still alive. Status: not finished reading yet. I have started reading it again and again several times because I wanted to memorize more details. I have not got close to even 50% of the text yet. 2. Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell, 2008). A very good book. Status: not finished reading yet. I have read only the first couple of chapters. I wrote about them in my blog a couple of weeks ago. I have not arrived closer to the end of the text yet. 3. Der soziale Schwan (Florian Willet, 2013). A German book that tries to make a synthesis of Darwinism, Economics, Social Sciences, etc. Very original ideas. Too bad the style is quite amateurish. Status: not finished reading yet. So far, I have read about 20% of the

Celebrating 20 years of demoscene activity

I just remembered it was about the end of 1997, when I was 14 years old, that I started hanging out on demoscene IRC channels. So it is my personal 20 year anniversary now. I have definitely been involved in the demoscene. It is not justified if somebody says I have no demoscene connections. In April 1998, I won an x86 Assembler size coding contest organized by a demoscene magazine. My own diskmag has focused on the demoscene since issue 11, from June 1998. Since 2008, I have participated in several demoscene competitions with my 256b intros and gamedev projects. So I have actually made more than only the diskmag. I think this is enough for me to be called a demoscener. Of course, more is yet to come. I am going to participate in the Demobit 2018 competitions with a photo and a 256 byte intro. If you happen to live close enough to Bratislava and have free time in the beginning of February, I highly recommend that you come to the party! I have already been there in 2017 and enjoyed it

Can the State of the Universe be Stored in a Computer?

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This article is a follow-up to my essay "The Universe as Automaton", which I published in WIN ONE, issue 11, from 2013. There, I developed the idea that the state of the universe might be modeled as a three-dimensional matrix and that the entire history of the universe could be represented as a state machine (automaton). In this article I also wrote: "It is not possible to have something that is as large as the entire universe represented by a computer - except, maybe, if it has enough redundancy that a suitable data compression algorithm could be applied." This is what I would like to investigate further now. Can a state of the universe be stored on a computer harddrive? What obstacles are connected with this endeavour? As a computer is part of the universe, it is obvious that the state of the universe can be stored on its harddrive only if we use some sort of encoding that acts as a data compressor. After all, the file that stores the state of the universe must