People who want to get fundamental physics out of cellular automata could be a lot more imaginative than they are. What about small-world networks? Maybe you could get quantum nonlocality. What about networks which are only statistically regular? Maybe you could get rotational symmetry in the continuum limit. And how about trying to do without a universal time coordinate? What about creation and destruction of cells, not just alteration of cell states? Euclidean, gridlike CAs like Fredkin's should only be a training ground for the intuition, not the template for modeling the real world.

With respect to the topic of this article, though I've flamed many-worlds for not really delivering on its promises, cellular-automata physics is not remotely comparable. Even billiard-ball physics is better empirically - at least it can reproduce Newtonian gravity! CAs haven't even done that. You can't say "Occam's razor favors X" if you haven't actually got X to work yet.