[quote name='Morley' timestamp='1317505443' post='4868089']
BUT if you are procedurally generatig and keep all variables for generation constant at rutime everytime, the data can quite wasily be drawn up completely identical to the last time. There, at least, you can effectively work around the hardware limits.
Certainly procedural generation can make it appear like there is more data stored than there really is, but ultimately it's a visualization of a very limited amount of data in the form a fractal that suggests more complexity than actually exists (if analyzed sufficiently, one would always find the same repeating patterns).
Just as we can easily write "turtles all the way down" and yield an infinite number of stacked turtles, it's not really an infinite amount of information; just the same piece of finite information repeated over and over again without end- a very, very small amount of actual information.
If your goal is repeatable procedural world generation that is truly infinite (instead of just repeating), you have to use a seed based on an irrational number that can be computed as one progresses through the world (starting locally with the highest decimal place, and moving out from there).
That would give you an infinite world, which is not simply a repeating pattern, and would look the same every time.
Of course, the problem with that is, as you expand outwards, the computation becomes more and more difficult, so either your progress slows to a crawl (taking hundreds of years to take a step, then millions of years, then billions of years) with increasingly larger computers needed (with increasing memory), requiring solar systems of space, then entire galaxies... Or you find a new irrational number of calculate.
Stepping ahead to the next irrational number just delays the problem. Eventually you are into the realm of the googleplex googleplex roots, and you run into the wall of processing power and computer memory again to merely fetch the next needed seed.
Consistent or complete- choose one. Gödel's a bitch, isn't he?
That's not to say we even need truly infinite worlds. Just with the information we could store on a thumb drive, it could take a human lifetime to explore.
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I agree. It's not a permanent solution. But its effective enough to provide the illusion of an infinite and, as you said, it would take a human a lifetime to explore every bit of data stored on a flash drive, bit by bit. But its so amazingly fascinating just to think about ideas like these and how data is processed and handled
I believe we will never truly obtain infinite storage. But we will, however, keep improving the ways data is processed, stored... etc.
(P.S sorry about my spelling/grammar in the prior post. From a friends iPhone. Didn't realise it was THAT bad till I read my post being quoted).
