the current highlight of my life is when one of the Outer Wilds devs responded to one of my youtube comments
@wallhackio @aescling hi please explain Quantum Entanglement in physics as dumbed down as possible for me because all I know is what I learned from Avengers Endgame
@The_T @aescling This is a difficult thing to explain in plain English. I will try my best. In Quantum Mechanics, the mathematical description of things is fundamentally probabilistic. Like, you might have a situation where a particle has a 50% of behaving one way, a 25% chance of behaving another way, and 25% of behaving in some third way.
Which way the particle behaves is determined when you observe the particle.
So interesting things can happen when you mathematically model two particles, which we will call particle A and particle B. Suppose that they each will blast off in one of two directions, and each particle must blast off in opposite directions to conserve momentum.
Well, when you mathematically model particle A, you might find that it has a 50% chance of moving left and a 50% chance of moving right. Since momentum must be conserved we would also say that particle B has a 50% chance of moving left and a 50% chance of moving right.
But when you actually observe particle A in reality, only one of its two possibilities occurred. And once you observe A, you know exactly how B must have moved because of the conservation of momentum. We describe particles which behave this way as being "entangled."
@wallhackio @aescling cool, that's nothing like Avengers Endgame! (don't ask me what that was like, I already forget)
also: so you're telling me that stuff I learned from TASes, where the randomness seed is always the same at the beginning but, for most games, changes randomly based on the frame, is true to quantum physics
@wallhackio @aescling I guess one thing I phrased poorly is that, during a TAS (and in a real video game instance), the random seed is consistent from frame to frame, ie, if you power on the system and do something on frame 10, it will always be the same result as long as it was exactly frame 10.
Just like in your example.
@wallhackio @aescling ok also I just realized, when speedrunners do luck manipulation, specifically if they do something in-game to check their current seed, and then use that information to determine the outcome of something else, that's also literally what you said, that's quantum entangelement
@aescling I found the Super Bunnyhop video funny because one of my first reactions in my first two hours of playing Outer Wilds was "omg the physics are actually kinda realistic what a spectacular demonstration of planetary physics the people who made this clearly understand and love physics" and I was just geeking out about it the whole time
@aescling Super Bunnyhop released a video about how Outer Wilds could be used as an educational tool about planetary physics (which is correct)
So I made a comment to the video pointing out that the concept of "Quantum Entanglement" as described in the game is completely different from the actual physical phenomenon of the same name. I felt this was important because if we were going to have people thinking Outer Wilds could be used to demonstrate physics, we should also have people be aware of what it gets "wrong".
And the lead dev of the game responded to my comment basically saying "yeah you're right, my bad"