Have you dug a bit in the concept under wolframphysics.org? Discretization of PDE equations is interesting and some generating-functionology/combinatorics can be spotted more or less over there. CAs can enter anything under the computational umbrella, question being how sleekly. Have they achieved something already, do you share their interests? (you said "ama")
Ha, well, I've mostly successfully dodged the various Wolfram-science questions so far. I just finished reading a book on cosmology -- VSL theory -- but honestly a lot this kind of thing seems to be way too far above my personal abstraction ceiling. I can't tell whether some of these ideas really even mean anything at all, or if it's just somebody who is better at waving words around than I am.
This is wandering off of the Wolfram physics project a fair distance, but it's hard to see how space could be quantized in a Fredkin "Nature is finite and digital" kind of way, without the underling "grain" of the universe becoming obvious in some kind of experiment, and/or without causing deep contradictions in various experimentally well-supported relativistic effects that require that there isn't any such thing as a unique fixed frame of reference.
But quite possibly that's just a failure of imagination on my part, not anything wrong with the actual theories in question -- I'm probably complaining about some apparent implausibility two levels above or below where the information is actually flowing. And there are certainly all kinds of properties of our physical universe that are quantized in one way or another, for utterly mysterious reasons.
Long story short, there is certainly still room for some big surprises in theoretical physics, and I'm not about to claim that I'm clever enough to rule out any of these wild options.
