Do you believe we are a simulation?

So, who's running the science experiment?

The Robots. Didn't you see The Matrix?

Ahh...

Some physicists have put forward the notion that the Universe could be a simulation, but recently (this week) a team of theoretical physicists from Oxford University in the UK claimed to have shown that life and reality cannot be merely simulations generated by a massive extraterrestrial computer. The finding -- an unexpectedly definite one -- arose from the discovery of a novel link between gravitational anomalies and computational complexity. Zohar Ringel and Dmitry Kovrizhi show that constructing a computer simulation, using a quantum Monte Carlo technique, of the quantum Hall effect is impossible -- not just practically, but in principle. They discovered that the complexity of the simulation increased exponentially with the number of particles being simulated. If the complexity grew linearly with the number of particles being simulated, then doubling the number of partices would mean doubling the computing power required. If, however, the complexity grows on an exponential scale -- where the amount of computing power has to double every time a single particle is added -- then the task quickly becomes impossible. They calculated that just storing information about a couple of hundred electrons would require a computer memory that would physically require more atoms than exist in the universe.