[rl3]

In thinking about this, I concluded the subatomic/quantum levels were far beyond my ability to comprehend or model accurately (if at all) since I'm not a physicist. Furthermore, both are still on the forefront of discovery and not fully understood.

Therefore, I reasoned that these low-level rules you're talking about may manifest upward in scale. If you created layered approximations of observable behavior, you could essentially capture the output of these rules even if not directly discovering them at a low level.

If you have a protein, a plant, planet and galaxy all on equal footing in terms of how they're approximated and simulated, then perhaps one could factor out commonality from each and deduce some sort of low-level rules from that.

With respect to our reality being an ancestor simulation, I'd say it's highly likely. You might be interested in looking at Bostrom's simulation hypothesis, if you already haven't.

[karmakaze]

This would be the most fun for me. Model the lowest levels of physical laws by creating a simulation universe of a very small volume and see how to make behaviours computable. Only rule is that you can't freeze time in the simulated universe while computing. So first off there has to be propagation limits to effects (or at least observability limits) within the simulated universe.

The best way to make this scalable might be to make each observer a CPU.