It is hard to believe, but Sunday will be the 20th anniversary of The Matrix. It was released on 31st March 1999. I'm going to assume you've seen it. At this point, if you haven't, it's probably somewhat spoiled for you anyway since the basic premise and the iconic images have been everywhere for the last...yes...twenty years. It was the first movie to sell a million copies on DVD, and helped drive the very idea of owning DVD players and a library of discs.

It has also aged well. It started by being ahead of anything else at the time, but it has also been very influential on subsequent cinematography. Its use of super-slo-mo, known as "bullet time" has appeared everywhere, even in dog food commercials. The way the fight scenes were choreographed raised the bar. Some of the ideas were adopted from Kung Fu movies. I wondered if Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon had influenced The Matrix, but I just looked and it came out a year later.

The Wachowski brothers, Laurence and Andrew, who made the movie, became first Lana and Andrew in the early 2000s, and then Lana and Lily in about 2016. I can't have been the only person to think that it seemed like something straight out of the movie. They are now known simply as the Wachowskis.

The movie had its roots in Japanese cinema. In an article in Forbes Magazine:

They pitched The Matrix idea to producer Joel Silver by showing him the 1995 Japanese cyberpunk action film Ghost in the Shell, saying, "We want to do that in live-action." He could not say no. From the flowing green digital typography used to descend into the virtual world to jacking-in through ports in the back of the protagonist’s neck, the Wachowskis borrowed extensively from director Mamoru Oshii's Ghost. It goes without saying that Neo’s long cloak and his Karate expertise were also borrowed from Japan’s traditional martial arts scene.

Simulation

The most interesting aspect of the movie for engineers in tech is whether the foundation of the movie, that most people are living in a simulation, could be true. In some ways, this is one of those hypotheses that can't be disproved, like whether we came into existence 5 minutes ago complete with all our memories. Or perhaps discussions about whether we have free will or it just seems like we do.

In 2003, in Philosophical Quarterly a paper appeared Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? It obviously wasn't the first time anyone had speculated about this—for a start, it was 4 years after The Matrix. But appearing in a top journal gave it rather more academic cachet than a Hollywood movie. The abstract read:

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

The short summary of the paper (it's 12 pages long) is:

If there are long-lived technological civilizations in the universe, and if they run computer simulations, there must be a huge number of simulated realities complete with artificial-intelligence inhabitants who may have no idea they’re living inside a game.

Like, maybe, us.

There have been various attempts to argue from complexity that we cannot be in a simulation, because the atoms required to run the simulation grow too fast, but they all seem flawed to me, since they assume that the laws of our universe, which are simulated, have to be the same as the laws of the universe running the simulation. If you just think of a video game, it is obvious that this doesn't have to be true. In fact, since the universe/game is only experienced by the characters, then only the part that is being observed by any of the characters needs to be simulated anyway. Or perhaps not even that, just their perception of what they seem to be observing. I mentioned free will above, but increasingly characters in the most state-of-the-art video games behave as if they have free will.

In an NBC News article, it is written with a click-baity title as if Elon Musk came up with the idea when he said:

If you assume any rate of improvement at all, games will eventually be indistinguishable from reality. We’re most likely in a simulation.

In The Matrix, various bugs in the simulation cause weird things to happen. If we are living in a simulation and there are bugs, they are nothing like as extreme as the ones in the movie. But who knows, maybe "dark energy" is just a bug in the calculations of the physics engine. Or the weird way observers in quantum mechanics seem to affect outcomes could just be the effect of algorithms in the simulation optimizing calculations by only simulating parts of the universe being observed, in the way that video games are implemented today.

The idea has its own Wikipedia page Simulation Hypothesis.

And in late-breaking news, from earlier this month, how about MIT Review's article A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality.

I'll give the last word to Neil deGrasse Tyson who moderated the Isaac Asimov debate reported on in Scientific American in Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?

We are essentially gods over our own computer creations. We don’t think of ourselves as deities when we program Mario, even though we have power over how high Mario jumps. There’s no reason to think they’re all-powerful just because they control everything we do.

Or how about Abstruse Goose as a change from XKCD:

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