The time of $1.99 quantum splitters, $0.99 iBeer, and $1.99 Lightsaber apps is long gone. Most of those apps didn't really do anything all that amazing, but looking back on it I think I miss when app stores were flush with "we could use the hardware to do this" rather than "we could get in-app purchases and subscriptions like this"

Not that there wasn't monetization as a goal back then, but just that there was a lot of weird paradigms being experimented on where we now have a solidly 10-year norm instead.

(Looks at source code, finds HKCD random function..)

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/691/transcript

If we assume that the universe is deterministic inside of itself except for quantum decisions, it seems reasonable to me that a structure on the outside of this universe would perform something like a Monte Carlo tree search (assuming that there is a "success condition" for a universe), and branches are only explored to some depth before being discarded. You could then - if you really had to - backtrack to an earlier known state and start exploring again.

In my general view, it's also likely that consciousness is only projected into branches once it's sufficiently established that they're reasonable to follow (I think consciousness might be expensive).

Some random ranting ...

Disclaimer: I have no background in physics at all. I saw this universe splitter and read "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" (Science-Fiction novella by Ted Chiang - the one mentioned in here), and thought hey that's fun.

Or when a debugger hits a break point reality 2 can proceed with the execution until you are done investigating.

It could even act like a RAID backup in case a random bit flip causes one reality to crash.

Alas it would be quite wasteful to spend watts on hypotheticals...

https://youtu.be/5hVmeOCJjOU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv5FYrOthvE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

downloading any app (much less using it) results in billions of worlds .....

Within seconds, Universe Splitter© will receive the experiment's result and tell you which of the two universes you're in, and therefore which action to take

if this thing is making my choices for me, then why not skip "the middle man" i.e. me?

I sense a rising humanity motion (like rationalism, or the englightnement or whaterver) towards letting the algorithms make all of our choices. The new absolute monarch is the Algorithm. The Kings are dead, long live the algorithms!?

disclaimer: as tha website is not serious but it does pretend to be, my own comment is also not entirely serious. Often difficult topics are better expressed through fiction (or partial fiction; fiction right now but maybe not later)

I fail to see the point, even if it is connected to some quantum device; it won't make any difference to me, whether my decision is made on a coin-toss or a wave-function collapse.

I can't imagine anyone using this app more than once.

Personally I don't think it makes any sense at all, although I have a mere batchelor's degree in physics so I'm not particularly well qualified to judge. I've never had a satisfactory answer to the simple emperor's new clothes question, which requires no knowledge of QM to ask, "If every outcome happens, in what sense is one outcome more probable than another?"

Because it is (experimentally, based on repeat trials), and QM furnishes us with the probabilities.

This is sometimes stated as "How do you get the Born rule?" but it's a simple and obvious question as soon as any sort of multiverse is proposed. I'm aware of the attempts to answer the question using decision theory but while they produce the right numbers they fail to provide a convincing justification for or interpretation of them (vs the simple, experimentally falsifiable frequentist view "if you repeat the experiment you'll see the frequencies approach these probabilities").