Page "Permutation City" Paragraph 20

Because of this, Durham is staging a massive, momentary buyout of the world's processing power to simulate a minute or two of a " Garden of Eden " configuration of an infinitely-expanding, massively complex cellular automaton universe ( similar to what is known as a " Spacefiller " configuration in Conway's Game of Life ) based on a fictional, Turing-complete cellular automaton known as TVC (" Turing / Von Neumann / Chiang ", named after its conceiver and designer ), in which each iteration of the expansion serves to " manufacture " an extra layer of blocks of a computing configuration.

Ultimately, if a Copy were to be run in such a self-consistent universe, and were to observe, via a series of pre-defined experiments, the cellular nature of its own processing implementation, then there would be precedent for that self-consistent " TVC universe " to persist in its own terms even after its termination and deletion in the universe it was designed and launched in.

His and his investors ' Copies would therefore persist indefinitely in the simulation, and since the " space " of the TVC universe would be made of self-reproducing cellular automaton computer processors, the simulation would not possess a finite number of states and the passengers would not, in principle, run out of interesting things to get up to.