Sunday 10 May 2020

How a quantum mechanics system is similar to a raytracing algorithm and also to the human brain

This phenomenon of when you measure a particle it collapses from a wave to a particle and stays that way kind of reminds me of raytracing & polygon rendering.

It's like the universe always starts with raytracing, because it just follows the principles, the rules of the universe and is very abstract & generic; not specialized to the situation.
Like it's trying to conserve computational power (even though I know raytracing is harder for computers. But come on, this is the universe we're talking about, it has "invented" the physics rules so its form of raytracing should be cheaper than trying to keep track of individual particles).
But then, if somebody needs to drill into the details, then it says, "well ok, then I guess I'll have to render the whole scene with polygons. It's more computationally intensive for me but since not everyone is asking me to do it at the same time, I can accommodate it".

It also reminds me of how the brain tries to do fuzzy routing if he can get away with it, because it is less computationally intensive. It interprets the world & gives instructions with the minimum possible level of detail. But then, if it spots out-of-context, it goes "well, I guess I'll need to turn my attention and add a lot of resolution to my input & output".

And this is just one of the many, many examples where I see repeatable patterns in the way systems get designed from the micro to the macro level. At some point in the future, I will analyze this in full detail.

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