A project about building Earth in Minecraft was posted months back. It raises a question of how much of Earth we can model (as in approximation complexity, not state space complexity) with our computing today. To what level of resolution and expanse. With a threshold when the computer starts modeling itself. Is there proper terminology for these? Surely it must have already been thought of.
Default Java Minecraft has a limit of 59999744 x 59999744 x 384.
Going off "510M sq/km" for the Earth's surface area, that gives you about 7 blocks per sq/m. You could drop down to 2x2 blocks per sq/m to give you a 50cm resolution (good enough, I reckon).
But the vertical resolution is awful. Sticking to ~sea level and modelling Everest, you'd get 23m/block which is useless for most things building-wise. If you wanted the Mariana Trench as well, you're down to 50m/block.
(You can change these in your `server.properties` but I've no idea what breaks.)
Bedrock is default 60000000 x 60000000 x 60000000 which gives you the 50cm horizontal resolution and (I think) ~0.3mm resolution vertically.
> With a threshold when the computer starts modeling itself
That's a fascinating comment
It would be great to have a list of systems where this already happened. With most neural nets, since they don't ever perceive the effects of their outputs on the world (only the effects of the last version perhaps, say GPT4 seeing/learning about GPT3 output and its effects on the internet), but for some reinforcement learning agents some level of self-awareness might have already occurred.
A flat Earth would be the "Minecraft way" of doing it. One could imagine building an actual 3D Earth, but it wouldn't be very large as the game probably isn't supposed to go NxNxN instead of NxNx512 or whatever the limit is.
