I was just thinking how similar the anthropic principle is to the general concept behind quantum computing (to the best of my limited knowledge: create a quantum superposition of states and the one which solves the problem is the solution). Uncanny.
It does not do exponential parallelism by trying many things at once. What it does do is create exponentially many paths, while some of which interfere with one another destructively. When you observe the system, then, some paths will have probability zero even though they have non-zero complex amplitudes associated with it.
Scott Aaronson's "Limits of Quantum Computers" to the rescue: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/The_Limits_of_Quantum_Com...