A computer program for simulating time travel and a possible 'solution' for the grandfather paradox

TL;DR

This paper presents a computational model and a computer program that simulate digital time travel, allowing exploration of paradoxes like the grandfather paradox and proposing potential consistent solutions within a virtual environment.

Contribution

It introduces a novel digital simulation framework for time travel and formalizes a simplified grandfather paradox to explore its possible resolutions.

Findings

System can simulate going back in time and attempting to alter past events.

The program generates scenarios that are consistent solutions to the grandfather paradox.

Digital time travel has potential practical applications in virtual environments.

Abstract

While the possibility of time travel in physics is still debated, the explosive growth of virtual-reality simulations opens up new possibilities to rigorously explore such time travel and its consequences in the digital domain. Here we provide a computational model of time travel and a computer program that allows exploring digital time travel. In order to explain our method we formalize a simplified version of the famous grandfather paradox, show how the system can allow the participant to go back in time, try to kill their ancestors before they were born, and experience the consequences. The system has even come up with scenarios that can be considered consistent "solutions" of the grandfather paradox. We discuss the conditions for digital time travel, which indicate that it has a large number of practical applications.