Comment by roywiggins
9 years ago
The problem with finding a physics bug is that it's liable to be amplifiable. Break conservation laws just a little bit and suddenly you have potential for exponential runaway leading to an unplanned reality excursion, and say goodbye to your light-cone.
Well, by definition the behaviour would be undefined so could go any which way. ;)
Modern day VM software has various levels of exception checking, and code to catch/mitigate/etc when bugs crop up.
So, a universe-capable simulator might have any kind of behaviour if/when a bug occurs. It doesn't need to be an unbounded, runaway scenario. :)
And, if a very bad reality excursion happens, you scrap that branch and restore the last checkpoint. Nobody inside the simulation will ever remember it. You only bother fixing it if halt/scrap/restore becomes a burden.
It probably happens more often than we imagine ;-)