Headscratchers / Devs

• If disproving determinism is as easy as throwing a gun after seeing yourself not throw it in the simulation, why doesn't anyone (for example Katie) systematically try (or manage) to do such things?
  • Presumably they did try. Lily tries to not go to Devs but goes anyway.
• Why can't the computer simulate beyond the moment of Lily's death? Nothing special seems to happen then.
  • Katie says that that's because Lily made a choice, but the simulation doesn't become pure static until two minutes after that.
• Katie could re-run simulations with different small modifications of the locations of objects, and thus identify what region of space causes the breakdown. Why doesn't she do that?
  • I believe she already knows that Lily's confrontation with Forrest is what causes the breakdown. She just doesn't know why or what happens next.
• If, as Katie says, the laws of the universe break down, how can a simulation of those laws detect that breakdown, as opposed to simply simulating what would happen if the laws would remain the same?
• What is the purpose of the shielding (lead, concrete, gold, vacuum) of the lab? To protect against espionage, or to shield the machine against interference, or to protect the outer world against the machine's influence (for example to limit the "breakdown of the laws of the universe")? In any of these cases, why is the lab designed such that anyone can just walk up to the glass door and see the central unit of the secret machine and the visualization screen?
• The Devs system models everything interacting with everything down to a subatomic level. "Everything" includes the computer itself. How can a computer run a simulation of something more complex than itself, and far faster than real time? The series itself even alludes to this problem with Stewart early on saying that to accurately model the entire universe you would need a computer as complex as the entire universe itself, but it is never answered.
  • I believe that the answer is just supposed to be "quantum computing."
• Why is Lily surprised when the electromagnetic lift drops in the simulation? She behaves as if she's already seen the simulation within the simulation, saying things like "This is the part where you get in." So she's already see herself fall. It only makes sense in reality, where Lily goes off-script and discovers that Stewart has shut off the magnetism, something she hadn't seen beforehand.