Great stuff. Wolfram is one of the brightest minds alive.
So what does this mean for negative mass in our models? Well, if there was a region of the hypergraph where there was somehow less activity, it would have negative energy relative to the zero defined by the “normal vacuum”. It’s tempting to call whatever might reduce activity in the hypergraph a “vacuum cleaner”. And, no, we don’t know if vacuum cleaners can exist. But if they do, then there’s a fairly direct path to seeing how wormholes can be maintained (basically because geodesics almost by definition diverge wherever a vacuum cleaner has operated).
Interesting to see he has arrived at Sidis' conclusion, here and in regards to the reversal of the second law of thermodynamics:
...once we have a simple state it’ll tend to evolve to a randomized state—just like we typically see. But the picture also shows that we can in principle set up a complicated initial state that will evolve to produce the simple state. So why don’t we typically see this happening in everyday life? It’s basically again a story of limited computational capabilities. Assume we have some computational system for setting up initial states. Then we can readily imagine that it would take only a limited number of computational operations to set up a simple state. But to set up the complicated and seemingly random state we’d need to be able to evolve to the simple state will take a lot more computational operations—and if we’re bounded in our computational capabilities we won’t be able to do it.
Later on he considers the idea of a "space demon" wherein you do branch prediction on the margins of a light cone (where it's easy enough to be possible) as a way to exceed
e:
The key question is then whether there are sufficient “pockets of computational reducibility” associated with space tunnels that we’ll be able to successfully exploit. We know that in the continuum limit there’s plenty of computational reducibility: that’s why our models can reproduce mathematical theories like general relativity and quantum mechanics.
But space tunnels aren’t a phenomenon of the usual continuum limit; they’re something different. We don’t know what a “mathematical theory of space tunnels” would be like. Conceivably, insofar as ordinary continuum behavior can be thought of as related to the central limit theorem and Gaussian distributions, a “theory of space tunnels” could have something to do with extreme value distributions. But most likely the mathematics—if it exists, and if we can even call it that—will be much more alien.
...in a sense, much of the historical task of engineering has been to identify pockets of reducibility in our familiar physical world: circular motion, ferromagnetic alignment of spins, wave configurations of fields, etc. In any given case, we’ll never know how hard it’s going to be: the process of finding pockets of reducibility is itself a computationally irreducible process.
Interesting that modern risk theory also deals with these extreme value distributions. Perhaps there is utility there.
