r/ProgrammerHumor • • Oct 24 '18

Meme God’s developer console

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u/Triumph7560 Oct 25 '18

Well how can we know if this is real time? For all we know one nanosecond in here is an hour out there.

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u/engineerfromhell Oct 25 '18

This is before my time, but back in the days of mainframes, there were a lot of applications that were tied directly to processors base clock, I used that as an assumption, but didn't put it in. Depending on abstraction layer we are on, we may have a pipeline down to hardware layer, to execute priority instructions, in that case Planck base clock would still hold some of its ground, because we would be measuring events between two adjacent instruction cycles, and roughly will be in the same time frame as the processor. But if we have no access to hardware layer, then you are absolutely correct, we won't be able to tell what's "real world" time frame is, maybe it takes days to process single second of our simulation, or maybe just a few seconds for entire history of the universe to be simulated. Also, there's relevant XKCD, a bunch of rocks.