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Help me ID a Sci-Fi Story about computation and evolution
June 25, 2014 11:48 AM   Subscribe

A few years ago I went into my school's SciFi library and I was given a book of short stories which I read several of sitting on the floor of the library. And then I put down the book and I don't remember what it was called. One short story was about a world in which computation speeds get faster and faster until someone, eventually makes computers capable of running models on the order of complexity of a world's worth of physics very very quickly. I think the computers may have been the shape of small cubes.

One foundation acquires one cube and runs the following experiment - they allow life to evolve on one cube, but they make the unit 'atoms' of the world large - so that the beings can more easily understand and manipulate their own forms.

The creatures become intelligent and then hyper-intelligent and they eventually the creators/scientists contact them through an avatar. They don't get along.

In the end, the cube-beings use physics unknown to the larger world to remove their cube from the scientists' power, maybe with a wormhole or a singularity or something like that.

Does any of this sound familiar?
posted by ch3cooh to Media & Arts (2 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Sounds like "Crystal Nights," by Greg Egan. You may read it here to check.
posted by adipocere at 11:59 AM on June 25 [3 favorites]


This sounded familiar. Look at this Ask.Me from last month.
posted by PlutoniumX at 12:00 PM on June 25


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