Simulation Universe Survival Guide
Qualitative behavioral change in a hopping glider as step size is modified.
Practical:
Modeling real-world complex, self-organizing systems (e.g. climate, weather, people): be aware that self-organization may include non-physical artifacts arising from precision as well as coarseness.
For compressing complex systems like LLMs, you may not always find better performance by decreasing quantization/compression. You get what you select for!
In Artificial Life you can accept simulation parameters and "artifacts" as part and parcel to a consistent reality (inhabited by your pseudorganisms) or you can be more careful about non-Platonic behavior.
Philosophical:
Entities wholly contained in a deterministic universe == no agency and no 'free will'?
Why can't we have clockwork agency? When there is no general shortcut to prediction, i.e. things are computationally irreducible (aka they are Entscheidungsprobleme, or decision problems), I think we can assign autonomy/agency without a "ghost in the machine".
If it makes you feel better about agency, you can always invoke quantum effects.
The universe may be indistinguishable from a quantum CA, but definitively proving/dis-proving a computational universe is likely intractable for the foreseebale future.
Regardless of what one thinks about the external universe (bit from it or it from bit?), the universe one actually inhabits, the mind, does display discretization artifacts and other perceptual/cognitive shortcuts.
Q. Tyrell Davis, Josh Bongard; July 18–22, 2022. "Step Size is a Consequential Parameter in Continuous Cellular Automata." Proceedings of the ALIFE 2022: The 2022 Conference on Artificial Life. ALIFE 2022: The 2022 Conference on Artificial Life. Online. (pp. 43). ASME. https://doi.org/10.1162/isal_a_00526, arxiv:2205:1272