A computed universe would have to approximate somewhere. This programme names the places where the approximation could show, and goes looking.
The question is not whether the universe is a simulation. It is whether any seam would still be visible if it were.
Anything computed has to approximate. A lattice has preferred directions. A clock has a smallest tick. Memory is finite. Randomness is generated rather than drawn from the world. Each of those is a place where the approximation could show — and each can be looked for without ever asking the metaphysical question.
The seams are named in advance, and so is the test that would close each one. Naming them first is what stops the search from becoming a hunt for whatever happens to look interesting afterwards.
A seam is only worth testing if the test can come back empty.
An instrument that cannot return nothing has not been shown to measure anything. A programme that reports only the seam that survived is telling a story; the ones that close are what establish that the apparatus was ever capable of closing them.
So each seam is declared before it is opened, with the outcome that would settle it written down first — including the outcome that would end the line of enquiry entirely.
“A surviving anomaly is not a discovery. It is a seam that has not yet been closed.”
