The continuous vs. discrete thing is largely moot in my opinion. The low-significant bits of any model of a physical process are going to be noise anyhow. You c

The continuous vs. discrete thing is largely moot in my opinion. The low-significant bits of any model of a physical process are going to be noise anyhow. You can model more accurately if there's some data that's missing, but the fact that the real world is continuous (ignoring that it's really not) doesn't really matter. We can model many billions of things at once. Take a look at the spinnaker system. Sure, we're not at the level of simulating 100 billion biologically plausible neurons yet, but we can do a few billion and the techniques are likely to scale well.