"So I came up with a way to make the many-worlds universe we wanted to simulate fit inside our budget constraints."

"Go on."

"Well, I did the obvious stuff first. Lowered the spatial resolution of the simulation to about a hundred billionth of a yoctometer and the temporal resolution to the amount of time it takes light to cross that distance."

"Sure, but that's still way more than we have the budget for."

"Here's where I got clever. Instead of splitting the timeline a whole bunch of times every time step for every single particle in the universe, I simulate particles as a probability field, and then only split the timeline and assign them an absolute position when they interact with each other! As far as I can tell, it'll be completely indistinguishable from doing it the regular way."

"That sounds like a pretty neat idea, but there's a flaw in your simulation. What if, for example, someone were to fire a stream of tiny particles toward a double slit? Unless the particles interact with something when they pass through the slit, you'll end up with an interference pattern, and particles will end up in places that they never should have been able to get to."

"Well, crap."

"I take it you already started the job?"

"Yup."

"How long has it been running now?"

"I dunno, maybe fourteen billion years, give or take. Not very long. I'll go shut it down."