2013-07-19
Explanation
This comic plays with the concept of computation and simulation in a delightfully absurd way. A man holds up a piece of cheese and declares to a woman: "Technically true: every object is an analog computer of itself. This machine is running a perfect simulation of cheese." He is pointing out that any physical object can be thought of as "computing" its own behavior -- the cheese is perfectly simulating the behavior of cheese at all times, because it literally is cheese.
The joke is rooted in a real (if somewhat tongue-in-cheek) observation from computer science and philosophy of physics. In a sense, every physical system does "compute" its own future state based on the laws of physics. A rock computes what a rock does, water computes fluid dynamics, and cheese computes cheese. This is technically true but completely useless as a framing -- it strips the word "computation" of any meaningful content by applying it to everything.
The votey extends the joke with the man adding, "And it''s running it faster than any supercomputer," which is also technically true. No digital simulation of cheese could run in real-time with perfect fidelity, because reality itself is the most efficient "simulator" of reality. The comic pokes fun at the kind of technically-correct-but-meaningless observations that come from taking scientific or philosophical concepts to their logical but absurd extremes -- a hallmark of SMBC''s humor.