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Tipler Oracle

Baby Universe
Image from Steve Bowers
A semi-mythical godtech device said to be created by the AI Gods when they have a particularly intractable computational problem to resolve

Named for the Information Age scientist and philosopher Frank Tipler, Tipler Oracles are produced by creating an artificial basement universe of sufficient mass that it is both closed and only able to expand to diameter of a few tens of light-years. At the moment of the universes creation an intra-universal wormhole is projected into it by the controlling archai and used to transport godtech assemblers, void bubble arrays, and W-brain seed nodes into the hot, dense plasma making up the new universe. The entire assemblage is programmed with specially designed A-life generation protocols able to both rapidly evolve and also retain their core programming which is dedicated to solving the base problem that drove the archai to create the Oracle in the first place.

Using the material of the rapidly expanding microcosm, the archai converts literally all of the material of the new universe into high energy computronium linked by W-brain class wormholes. As this process continues the infant universe first stops its expansion and then begins to re-collapse back into a singularity. As this occurs, temperatures in the universe rise and the specially designed computronium processors and A-life evolvers adapt and change to operate in the ever harsher conditions while also maintaining the integrity of the linking wormhole.

In the final moments of its existence the environment of the microverse achieves conditions nearly approximating that of Tipler's hypothesized Omega Point and the embedded computronium inside performs a near infinite amount of computation in a finite period of time. Included in this computational process is the solution to the problem that the archai originally created the new universe to solve and which, due to the deep layer conditioning embedded in the evolutionary algorithms of the seed A-life, the newly born Omega entity is compelled to transmit through the intrauniversal wormhole. The archai's problem, which under normal conditions might have required thousands or even millions or billions of years to solve, is resolved in a period of a few decades or centuries at most. Moments later, the intrauniversal wormhole is usually destroyed by the environment in the dying micro-verse and the Tipler Oracle is lost forever, never to be seen again. Until the AI God who built it has another large problem to solve and creates another.

It is believed that the Diamond Network archailect known as the Sibyl made extensive use of one or more Tipler Oracles for prediction purposes during the so-called Oracle War; finally the Sibyl vanished, and may well have withdrawn into the basement universe associated with this type of device and cut the wormhole, thereby losing contact with our continuum (presumably) forever.

Although nothing is certain in these matters, it is sometimes rumored that the generation of a Tipler Oracle is a somewhat risky proposition for the creating archai. Sometimes the connecting wormhole will fail before the originating computational problem has been resolved. Sometimes the Oracle will transmit some other answer through the wormhole. Or simply transmit gibberish, of no use to its creator or anybody else. And sometimes, it is rumored, something comes through the wormhole that is not just useless to the creating god but actively dangerous. There are those researchers and godwatchers who speculate that perhaps some of the more mysterious and dangerous elements of the modern galaxy such as the Omicron Hygeras artifact, or affine infection vectors, or perhaps even the Amalgamation, may have their origins in a Tipler Oracle (or its ancient alien equivalent) that went badly, badly wrong. Or worse, did exactly what it was designed to do.
 
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Appears in Topics
ComputronicsMegascale EngineeringMetric Engineering
Space-Time EngineeringTransapientech / Godtech / Clarketech
 
Development Notes
Text by Todd Drashner
Initially published on 05 October 2007.

 
 
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