That reminds me of a story where a student couldn't figure out the properties of some physical system, so he ran a massive simulation of a universe with laws of physics similar to his own (but, of course, cutting corners whenever possible). This universe eventually produced a life form intelligent enough to figure out the necessary equations, at which point he happily copied them to his homework and forgot about the simulation.

...only to find it days later (= billions of years of simulated time), by which point the simulated life had figured out that their universe was written hastily and its laws were full of subtle bugs, like floating-point rounding errors showing up in physical measurements. Their technological advance let them move stars around, which they grumpily arranged in a message saying "your code sucks".

Can't find it at the moment, does anyone recognise the reference? It could be in one of these books, I suppose, but I don't have them.