Are We Living In A Simulation?

Could computers ever become sophisticated enough to build a convincing facsimile of the real world? What if they already have and we’re living in that facsimile? Dr Peter Bentley looks into the likelihood of us being trapped in the Matrix

- Dr Peter Bentley

Today’s computers are incredible. Nearly 50 years ago, we had Pong, one of the first computer games, which played ‘tennis’ using moving blocks on each side of the screen. Today we have photo-realistic virtual worlds filled with computer-generated characters that all seem to move and behave as they should.

The advancement of computers is said to follow Moore’s Law, named after Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel. In the 1960s, Moore saw the rate of progress and predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years. By the mid 1970s there were 10,000 transistors on a chip. By 1986 it was more than a million. And by 2020 we had 2.6 trillion.