So what does any of this mean? At the very least, the numbers represent the most computing the Universe could have supported, or the minimum size of a computation for simulating the Universe, Lloyd notes. More interestingly, he says, the fact that the ops calculation from information theory and the bits calculation from quantum gravity gave equivalent results "suggests that we can go on being hopeful that there's a connection out there" between quantum gravity and computation. The Universe's program could be thought of as the primordial quantum fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies, he says. "It's not running Windows or Linux, and we hope that it never shall."

http://focus.aps.org/story/v9/st27