It’s worth pointing out that we’re increasingly seeing video games rendering with continuous seed functions that convert to discrete units to track state changes from free agents, like the seed generation in Minecraft or No Man’s Sky converting mountains into voxel building blocks that can be modified and tracked.

In theory, a world populated by NPCs with decision making powered by separate generative AI would need to do the same as the NPC behavior couldn’t be tracked inherent to procedural world generation.

Which is a good context within which to remember that our own universe at the lowest level is made up of parts that behave as if determined by a continuous function until we interact with them at which point they convert to behaving like discrete units.

And even weirder is that we know it isn’t a side effect from the interaction itself as if we erase the persistent information about interactions with yet another reversing interaction, the behavior switches back from discrete to continuous (like we might expect if there was a memory optimization at work).