Tuesday, February 6, 2007

Emulation and experiencing time

Now some experiments purport to show that time is not linear, it does not exist, or worse. It might be that not our world is emulated (think matrix) but that our own OS (HS, for Homo Sapiens) is running on older foundations foisted upon us by evolution.

Think of what people do: they build emulators. Actually the whole of computing is mostly building simulators or emulators. You might think your Core 2 Dual is fast, but actually it is mostly a simulator for some old electronic calculator instruction set. What it actually can do is shown by other processors, but the fact that they are not popular underscores my point in a way.

Now what can we learn if we reflect upon emulators, simulators and other layered implementations? Some things run bad because they are constrained by the underlying layer, like I/O and access to other serialized resources. Emulators greatly benefit from some hardware assist. Especially timing issues identify running in the emulation layer. Aha.

Now it would be interesting to devise how our conscience runs on a lower layer inherited from the primates and earlier, how we employ our own abstractions and how we are limited by the platform. We should also specify what can run on our platform and how to get rid of the constraints it puts upon future systems.