To better understand the deep significance of our best physical theories it
could be interesting to compare our Universe with its models. It may happen
that the differences between the model and reality can be made
indistinguishable, to the point that it may seem acceptable to consider reality
as a gigantic program, a 'mother computation' running in a Universal Computer.
The computational interpretation of reality is here adopted for introducing
concepts that are common in computer science, they may offer a new insight. For
instance, code and memory usage optimization techniques are common in computer
science because they improve the performances at a reduced hardware cost.
According to the concepts discussed in this paper, the possibility of
recognizing the effects of optimization rules in a physical reality will allow
us to discriminate if our reality is fundamental or the result of a large
computation. Conversely, code and memory optimization has side effects, if it
is present in our Universe it can produce many interesting phenomena, some seem
readily recognizable, others only wait to be discovered.Comment: This is an excerpt from an article accepted by Space Technology and
Applications International Forum (STAIF 2006) February 12-16, 2006,
Albuquerque Hilton Hotel. Space applications omitted. Title changed
accordingly. 6 pages with 1 figure added for version
