Dr. Pat offers thoughts on living in a simulation. If this is a simulation, what is the Simulator trying to learn?

In what way is the simulation different from the original?

This could be very subtle, it could be a butterfly effect type change, like altering the gravitational constant by 1/googleplex or (in a more local, less basic tweak) change the size of a continent slightly, change visible constellations.... in other words, something we could never guess.

Rejecting these possibilities as unguessable, and hence boring, what contingencies would I fool with to see how history changed. This is (I imagine) part of an overall scheme to gain divergent views, possibly even divergent technologies, that would be useful to the instigator of the simulation.

...

Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel argues that the long East-West axis of Eurasia determined its greater technological development compared to Subsaharan Africa, Australia and the Americas. Well that would be worth playing with.

More here.

-Linkathon.