Everything on this site · the map
This site works out what it would take to simulate a world. It doesn’t argue that we’re in one. The pages below are grouped by what they do.
- Trees · explorable histories
- Technology tree · 82 nodes: how virtual worlds became possible
- Simulations tree · 107 nodes: what we have learned to simulate
- Ethics tree · 91 nodes: where our rules came from, and where they go
- Becoming synthetic · 100 nodes: from biological to synthetic life
- Sandbox · nine parameters, one total: the computing a simulated universe takes
- Scenarios · 9 preset universes, each worked out
- Featured scenario · one scenario a day, the same for everyone
- The countdown · when could our computers run each simulation
- What a computer can run · given a computer, what world can it run
- Simulations within simulations · how deep can a stack of simulations go
- The computing in one day · how much computing would one day of a life take
- Mind assessment · check a system against the evidence
- Interactive models · cellular automata, flocking, epidemics, traffic, ant colonies and more, running in your browser
- Entities · 44 minds and possible minds, in order of evidence
- Sentience criteria for animals · the eight criteria from the 2021 review that led UK law to recognise octopuses and crabs as sentient, and what the review found
- How directed time is estimated · how the Entities charts weigh religions, states, parties and corporations by how much of their members’ waking time they direct. Every practice, survey share and source is listed
- Consciousness indicators for AI · the fourteen indicators from Butlin, Long and colleagues (2023), taken from six scientific theories of consciousness
- Simulations · 18 domains of the simulations people actually run
- Simulations by floor · every simulation sorted by the smallest entity it tracks, from quarks up to pure rules
- Simulations by method · the same taxonomy sorted by computational method, from Monte Carlo to agent-based to real-time
- Simulations by era · when the first simulation of each kind ran, from orreries and war games to the present
- Simulations by cost · how much computing each kind of simulation uses, from no computer at all to the largest machines on Earth
- Library · 55 terms, each with a definition and what it does in the model
- Thinkers · 14 thinkers, each with its matching sandbox dial
- Guided routes · five minutes, an hour, or for research
- Objections · the standard objections, and where the computing model stops
- Tests · proposed experiments and physical bounds, and what each one found
- Reading · annotated further reading, with difficulty tags
- Method · how each total is worked out, with sources
- What runs here · no cookies, no accounts, one page counter
- Home · what this is, and three ways in