[breuleux]

I feel these limitations are pretty central to the way our universe works, and that without them the universe would be very deeply different. You can only "simplify" the world so much before it becomes something else entirely, or loses its interesting properties. For instance, if you use fluid dynamics to simplify the simulation of the ocean, you'll save a lot of computation and it'll look the same, but life won't evolve in it.

> Isolating each "light cone" of local spacetime allows the simulation to be distributed and run on separate compute clusters, because it limits things to local interactions rather than universal ones.

I don't know if that would make a difference. If you split the universe into zones and assign a cluster to each, they still have to interact with each other all the time because of the boundary. Besides, in a universe where interactions can be "universal", what's the performance gain of local algorithms?

> Things in superpositions only becoming "set" after observation... that is just lazy evaluation.

Really, though, what collapses a quantum state is interaction in general. It happens everywhere, all the time, so I don't know if there's actually anything to gain with this "lazy" evaluation.