From survivors to something that looks like physics.

Once you know which configurations survive (Step 3), the real test is what that surviving structure looks like once you zoom out — far enough to stop seeing individual configurations and start seeing something like the world around us. This is where SFT tries to recover actual physics as a consequence, rather than assuming it up front.

Gravity is the strongest result so far. Zooming out on the survivor dynamics reproduces the mathematical backbone of general relativity, together with a cosmological constant — the term that governs how fast the universe's expansion accelerates — whose size traces back to a decay rate already built into the theory elsewhere. That's notable because the real cosmological constant is famously, almost absurdly small compared to naive theoretical estimates; SFT doesn't need to introduce a new number by hand to land in the right range.

Ordinary forces come out of the theory in general, but one piece is conditional rather than settled: the strong nuclear force specifically depends on an additional structural assumption that hasn't been derived from anything more basic yet. Matter — specifically, particles with the right mathematical footing to behave like the fermions everything is built from — also emerges, using a construction chosen to dodge a well-known pitfall of naive lattice approaches. Whether that construction's own technical requirement actually holds is currently an open question, not yet resolved either way.

Space itself is required to have at least four dimensions — three of space, one of time — for reasons that trace directly back to the substrate's own algebra. That's a genuine mathematical floor, not a free choice. It rules out anything with fewer dimensions; it doesn't, on its own, rule out more.