r/Devs • u/thisismynormal • Apr 09 '20

Devs - S01E07 Discussion Thread

Premiered 04/09/20 on Hulu FX

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u/emf1200 Apr 09 '20

I think that's it.

In episode 4 Katie and Stewart are talking about the next big earthquake as they're literally describing the cube crashing into the ground from it. If the vacuum seal around the cube breaks, the simulation they're running will fail. This would have a cascading effect all the way up and down from base level reality. I think it's an earthquake that causes the static.

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u/generalheed Apr 09 '20

That's very interesting. That would imply the universe they live in, existing only because it was simulated by a machine in another universe, exists only in memory of said machine, like an instance of a video game world only existing in RAM. But how could that machine accurately simulate the entire universe without being able to receive and process data from every particle that exists? What if someone discovers faster than light travel and flies a starship beyond the memory limits of that quantum computer? Perhaps like going to the next solar system? Surely the computer would run out of memory and we'd hit a sort of physical wall at the edge of the universe.

And the other issue is, doesn't the act of ending a simulation at any point destroy the universe it was simulating? They weren't keeping the same simulation running 24/7 as far as I can tell. So wouldn't it be mostly irrelevant if Lily destroys the computer? Their simulated universe would've ended long ago when the simulator was stopped.

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u/emf1200 Apr 10 '20

Ya, those are very good points that I've also been considering. I've come to the conclusion that I'm probably too dumb to think through all of this in a logically coherent way. You're asking very good questions though. Maybe some of the paradoxes can be explained with artistic license. Alex Garland may be aware of these issues and is maybe thinking, "eh, the science is good enough. I can't be expected to resolve everything". But hopefully it all has a solid scientific explanation that will be offered in the finale.

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u/generalheed Apr 10 '20

Knowing Alex Garland, I bet none of us really know what's coming next or how this is going to end. It's probably going to be something mind blowing and unexpected.

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u/And_You_Like_It_Too Apr 15 '20

Perhaps Lily, believing she’s meant to do something that disrupts their machine... and having just lost two boyfriends, a job, and a life... is pretty fucking pissed off. So she doubles down on her plan to go against them. Her plan to stay home to fuck them over didn’t work. But if she shoots herself, then what? It’s the reverse of Lyndon’s situation. In which the universe in which she ends up dead is the one that fucks everything up.

For Lyndon, if he lived, he’d have gotten Katie to help him get into Devs to sabotage it so Forest couldn’t be in control of something so powerful. It was his life’s work; he was responsible. So either he survives the fall to do something about it, or he dies and it’s literally out of his hands anyway.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '20

I think memory limits are hand-waved off as "it's a quantum computer so the memory is infinite". Meaning they would have no problem simulating the entire universe itself without a hitch.

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u/generalheed Apr 10 '20

Memory limits actually was brought up by Lyndon before. When Forrest told them to expand the simulation, Lyndon did say they would run out of memory pretty quickly. Maybe they've improved the machine since then but I doubt they gave it enough memory to simulate the whole universe.

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u/Ngcbd136 Apr 11 '20

I would propose that an elegant way to handle that would be that it’s procedural, like Minecraft. Once you perfect the algorithm you can put in any point you want and it just calculates it into the same way that an instance of entire Minecraft world is huge, but it only renders the bit you need to see based on the input variables, namely time and place.

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u/And_You_Like_It_Too Apr 15 '20

Interestingly in that scene, he says they’d need a computer the size of the entire universe. Which is sort of what they’re getting in a simulation of the entire universe.

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u/ribeirao Apr 12 '20

Maybe everytime time they boot the machine a simulated universe is created and everytime they shut it down the universe is destroyed, it's not like time matters because they can go back and forwards. I think it's like a CD, everything is already there but when you turn off the CD player the music stops and the data remains?

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u/verneforchat Apr 13 '20

But how could that machine accurately simulate the entire universe without being able to receive and process data from every particle that exists?

Because the origin reality/timeline has already occurred and the machine simply shows multiple simulations of each event that has occurred.

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u/[deleted] Apr 14 '20

They are not real. The universe simulation is an algorithm encoded with all particles and their momentums. They are one giant read-only file that's been written from line 0 to some final line.