On 15 Apr 2002, at 16:17, Juergen Schmidhuber wrote: > I am also interested in pointers to early fiction. For decades > SF authors have been writing about downloading minds onto machines. > And when I was a kid in the 1970s (?) I heard a fictional play on the > radio (maybe British?) about researchers in a submarine who discover > that they are actually living in a rather crude computer simulation. > I came across variants of this theme again and again in numerous > more recent SF novels - but who was the first to write down such > ideas? >
I don't know who is the first, but there is the fabulous novel "Simulacron 3" by Daniel F. Galouye, first published in 1964. Scientists simulate a town in a big computer to collect marketing data. There is an amazing description of a memory page exception, lived by a simulated character ! It has been adapted by Josef Rusnak as "The Thirteenth Floor". (I haven't see the movie.) Matthieu. -- http://matthieu.walraet.free.fr
