Yeah, I found this when I was Boinc protein folding for Covid. The work units ran for hours, my towercPC nearly melted, and then I found that this produced mere milliseconds of simulation!
Now consider that the Planck time is actually 1e-44 secs.
Hardly any actual physical simulations simulate every possible moment in time. We just calculate consequences of current events and put them in the queue to happen sometime in the future. And there's evidence that the real world works in a similar way.
Bonds jiggle and wiggle with characteristic times in femtoseconds, and most people believe it's not necessary to simulate at higher frequencies than that.
Yes, I agree with that. My point was just that stimulating a rudimentary model of reality is hard work, but reality is way more complex than even that.
> nearly melted
I’ll be that guy, but a computationally complex problem won’t push your computer to a temperature beyond design limits.
It’s just a turn of the phrase.
When someone says that the sky is falling, that also doesn’t need to be explained
You're welcome to come to my attic office in summer, as they ambient temperature reaches 200F m a sunny day and my obsolete-but-powerful tower PC consumes 350W power and adds to the tropical heat :)
> a computationally complex problem won’t push your computer to a temperature beyond design limits.
Allegedly. It allegedly won't do that.
Practically, running your CPU at design limits for a very long period of time tends to cause the temperature of the rest of the chassis to want to equalize to that temperature, which can be above comfort limits.