Earlier quoted context omitted.
> path-dependent nature of our hardware architecture, not anything fundamental Anyway, there's no reason entities in a physics simulation would have such direct access to the primitives of the underlying computer, and trying to crash your host simulation does not seem like a reliable, healthy, or in any other way advisable approach to finding out if you're in one.
There's no reason to assume we will know how to prevent such direct access in a way that isn't sufficiently more costly that simulations without sufficient protections are more likely than those who are. It would presume simulations are limited to being run more often by entities willing to be exceedingly conservative and careful than by entities making mistakes that creates openings. You don't need to try to crash y…
Again, that's assuming their reality looks anything like ours. This is the real problem with these discussions, we're speculating about the motives of entities we cannot even in principle have any information about.
By the way, you might want to figure out how much you're actually worried about breaking the simulation, since you acknowledge that corruption would be a problem. Reasoning from human simulations, as seems to be your wont, do you think that risk of corruption is small enough to be so gung ho about messing with things?