In Fiction
In Greg Egan's novel Permutation City, the protagonist uses a Garden of Eden configuration to create a situation in which a copy of himself can prove that he is living within a simulation. Previously all his copies had found themselves in some variant of the "real world" after being terminated; although they had memories of being simulated copies living in a simulation, there was always a simpler explanation for how those memories came to be. The Garden of Eden configuration, however, cannot occur except in an intelligently designed simulation. The religious parallels are intentional.
Read more about this topic: Garden Of Eden (cellular Automaton)
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“A predilection for genre fiction is symptomatic of a kind of arrested development.”
—Thomas M. Disch (b. 1940)
“We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)