For example, speed is absolutely bounded at c. If I were designing an actual universe (not a model), I wouldn't enforce upper bounds--what purpose would they serve? If I were designing a model, however, boundaries of this sort would be critical to reducing the complexity of the model universe to the realm of tractable computability.
This is not true in general. I've considered a similar idea before, but as a reason to believe we don't live in a simulation (not that I think this is a very convincing argument). I work in computational fluid dynamics. "Low-Mach"/incompressible fluid simulations where the speed of sound is assumed infinite are much more easily tractable than the same situation run on a "high Mach" code, even if the actual fluid speeds are very subsonic. The difference of running time is at least an order of magnitude.
To be fair, it can go either way. The speed of the fluid is not "absolutely bounded" in these simulations. These simulations are not relativistic, and treating them as that would make things more complicated. The speed of acoustic waves, however, is treated infinite in the low Mach limit. I imagine there are situations in other branches of mathematical physics where treating a speed as infinite (as in the case of acoustic waves) or zero (as in the non-relativistic case) simplifies certain situations. In the end, it seems like a wash to me, and this offers little evidence in favor or against the simulation hypothesis.
Huh. It never occurred to me that imposing finite bounds might increase the complexity of a simulation, but I can see how that could be true for physical models. Is the assumption you're making in the Low Mach/incompressible fluid models that the speed of sound is explicitly infinite, or is it that the speed of sound lacks an upper bound? (i.e., is there a point in the code where you have to declare something like "sound.speed = infinity"?)
Anyway, I've certainly never encountered any such situation in models of social systems. I'll keep an eye out for it now. Thanks for sharing!
As per a recent comment this thread is meant to voice contrarian opinions, that is anything this community tends not to agree with. Thus I ask you to post your contrarian views and upvote anything you do not agree with based on personal beliefs. Spam and trolling still needs to be downvoted.