A well-designed simulation is inescapable. Suppose that you are inside Conway’s game of life, and you know that fact for sure. How specifically are you going to use this knowledge to escape, if all you are is a set of squares on a simulated grid, and all that ever happens in your universe is that some squares are flipped from black to white and vice versa?
To answer your first question, some kinds of pseudo-randomness are virtually indistinguishable from actual randomness, if you do not have a perfect knowledge of the entire universe. For example, in cryptography, changing one bit in the input message can on average flip 50% of bits in the output message. Imagine that the next round of pseudo-random numbers is calculated the same way from the current state of the universe—the slightest change in the position of one particle on the opposite side of the universe could change everything.
A well-designed simulation is inescapable. Suppose that you are inside Conway’s game of life, and you know that fact for sure. How specifically are you going to use this knowledge to escape, if all you are is a set of squares on a simulated grid, and all that ever happens in your universe is that some squares are flipped from black to white and vice versa?
To answer your first question, some kinds of pseudo-randomness are virtually indistinguishable from actual randomness, if you do not have a perfect knowledge of the entire universe. For example, in cryptography, changing one bit in the input message can on average flip 50% of bits in the output message. Imagine that the next round of pseudo-random numbers is calculated the same way from the current state of the universe—the slightest change in the position of one particle on the opposite side of the universe could change everything.