Noax wrote: ↑Sat May 27, 2017 2:12 am
But one does the simulation to see what it does, and often what it does is not part of the original imagined thing. The simulation surprises me, as it should. So given that fact, did the simulated reality actually exist in my imagination first?
One hears this point often. "My program did something unexpected. Does that mean my program is clever in some way?"
The answer is of course no, and in fact there's a huge counterexample so obvious everyone misses it.
Every person in the world who has ever learned to program has been surprised by their program. You get an idea, you type it in, you run it -- and it does something unexpected.
There's a name for when the actual program behavior differs from the expected program behavior. It's called a bug!
The truth is that once a program gets to be more than a hundred lines of code, you don't really know ahead of time everything it will do. Programs are hugely complex. That's why writing programs is specialized technical work. Nobody knows how Amazon.com's code works, or how Microsoft Windows works, or how your web browser works. It's normal for software to have behavior unanticipated by the designers and programmers.
For that matter, corporations are full of decades worth of legacy code that nobody understands. The last people who understood the code retired in 1980. Since then they patch it as needed, try not to break things, and throw money at their 2.0 complete rewrite; a class of project with a notoriously high rate of failure.
Nobody knows how software works. That was already true in the 1960's.