Ralph’s Simulation

A short story entry that won the first prize at the Science Fiction Writing Competition of the National Science Festival held here in college.

 

Ralph was excited to find the announcement in the morning newspaper – the first ever “Inter-Galactic Simulation Contest”. As a college student at the prestigious University of Andromeda on Planet Xing, Ralph was honing his skills on simulation technology – a quickly growing field in which the universe’s best scientists strived to make simulations of intelligent civillizations.

The contest rules were clearly outlined in the announcement:

1. Simulated entities must be self-conscious

2. The simulation must last at least three Xingonian years

3. A maximum of three programmer interventions are allowed

4. A minimum of one thousand output strings per second that resonate deep existential angst must be produced from the third year onwards

The second requirement troubled Ralph. It was common knowledge among simulation scientists that intelligent life simulations have never lasted more than three Xingonian years; the civillization tended to self-destroy. This seemed to be an inherent limit in intelligent civillization simulations (ICS).

Nevertheless, Ralph decided to enter his latest ICS project into the contest. It had been running smoothly for nearly 2.8 Xingonian years.

Ralph had decided to call it Earth.

Earth was being supported by the most advanced Quantum Supercomputers at the University of Andromeda. The initiation of Earth simulation was set at a point which the simulated “Earthlings” referred to as the Ice Age.

Earth ICS soon came to be regarded as one of the leading candidates for the contest. It overshot the number of existential angst output strings required by a factor of hundred. Better yet, the civillization appeared to be stable and Ralph hadn’t used even one of the allowed programmer interventions. (A programmer intervention was when the project head manually effected a change in the simulation. This was usually done if and when the ICS became unstable and tended towards self-destruction.)

It was around running time 2.85 Xingonian years that Ralph decided to make his first intervention. Ralph felt that the progress of science and technology was rather dull. So, at around 1905 AD Earth-time, Raplh sparked up an otherwise unimpressive clerk in the Swiss Patent Office with a universal truth – the Principle of Relativity. Although Ralph did this with the best of intentions, it turned out that Einstein’s E=mc² that followed from relativity soon gave rise to the atomic age and new tensions betwen global superpowers.

Ralph watched in horror as nuclear arms started piling up in his simulation. He needed to make an intervention again – that too only 0.001 Xingonian years after his first!

Ralph’s second intervention made sure that the Cold War remained cold. As the years progressed and Ralph’s simulation hit the 2.9 mark, new dangers started to surface, the most pertinent of which were Global Warming and the Large Hadron Collider.

He didn’t have to worry about the first; it would destroy the simulation only well after the three year requirement. But the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator being built at CERN in Europe, was an immediate threat! The true laws of physics required that when the LHC switched on in May 2008, micro-black-holes would form in the accelerator due to the high energy collisions and devour the entire Earth simulation.

The Earth physicists had missed out this point.

Circa February 2008, Ralph was racking his brains trying to figure out how he should intervene to prevent the LHC initiation when a major glitch came up. An unassuming Earth boy who was participating in a SciFi Writing Competition had unwittingly initiated an infinite self-referential loop in the simulation. In his existential exasperation, the boy had decided to write a story about how an Andromedan named Ralph made a simulation called Earth in which an Earth boy wrote a story about how an Andromedan named Ralph made a simulation called Earth in which an Earth boy wrote a story about how… ad infinitum.

The self-reference took over the Earth as all processing stopped and the Earth simulation came to a grinding halt. It had run for 2.97 Xingonian years. Dismayed, Ralph wondered whether the three year limit was fundamental to the universe itself…