[andyjohnson0]

A short story by Stephen Baxter, Touching Centauri, touches on this issue of model resulution and observers. [Spoilers ahead]

The protagonists use a powerful laser to bounce a pulse of energy off an exoplanet. This forces the entities who (it emerges) are simulating the universe (or maybe just our local portion of it) to massively increase the accuracy and extent of the simulation, so that the returned pulse behaves as physically expected. Previously they had been simulating the remote star system in a low resolution way due to the lack of observers there. The sudden need to increase the simulation's extent and resolution overwhelms their computational resources and the simulation crashes. A resource exhaustion attack on "reality", in other words.