WHY THE FUTURE KEEPS SLIPPING YOUR MIND

摘要

Remember to keep your past and future in the proper order. Although the laws of physics don't care if you live backwards in time, natural selection might Heinrich Pas of the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany, and his team modelled the lives of "agents" trying to dodge falling rocks within a two-dimensional grid. "We have something like sex and violence. The rocks kill the individuals, and the individuals breed," Paes says. Each rock bounces off the grid's walls like a ball on a billiard table. To give the simulation an arrow of time, rocks break in half on hitting a wall, which increases entropy, a measure of time's flow (see main story). If an agent is about to get hit by a rock. they have some chance of stepping out of the way, but they can only avoid one at a time. If two are incoming, they will certainly be hit, draining their "health" by an amount determined by the size of the rock.