Computational Universe: Observer-Limited Rendering

Observer Bubble

Observation radius 6.0

Grid resolution 18³

Simulation speed 3.0 gen/s

Reality Budget

Generation

Live cells

Computed this step

% universe simulated

Frozen (outside bubble)

How it works

The grid holds a 3D cellular automaton — Carter Bays' outer-totalistic rule "4555" (26-neighbour Moore neighbourhood):

Survive: cell alive AND neighbours ∈ {4, 5}
Birth:   cell dead  AND neighbours = 5
Else:    cell dies / stays dead

In Observer-limited mode only cells inside the glowing sphere — the "observation bubble" of radius r centred on the origin — are recomputed each generation. Everything outside is left exactly as it last was: uncomputed, frozen, exactly the way a game engine skips physics for anything outside the camera frustum, or the way Bostrom's resource-conservation argument for the simulation hypothesis suggests an ancestor-simulation would only render fine detail where an observer is actually looking.

Switch to Full omniscient mode and the whole lattice updates every generation regardless of the bubble — the "% universe simulated" readout jumps to 100% and you can watch how much more it costs to keep the entire universe self-consistent all the time.

Observation radius — size of the actively-computed bubble.
Grid resolution — side length N of the N×N×N lattice (rebuilds and reseeds the universe).
Simulation speed — generations advanced per second.
Bright violet cubes = alive & currently inside the bubble (being computed). Dim grey-blue cubes = alive but frozen outside it.

Observed / computed cell Frozen cell (unobserved) Observation bubble

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