Actually Plato was instrumental in the work I'm referring to. It was effectively using Plato's demiurge and concepts of eikon as a response to Epicurean naturalism and the commitment to the belief that death was final. Effectively arguing that even if the world came to be from natural causes and the soul initially depended on the body such that death was inescapable, that the eventual development of a creator of worlds would allow for a recreation in the image (eikon) of the original physical universe but without actually being tied to and dependent on physical form. Claiming that this had already happened and we just don't realize it, it emphasized that the better situation was to be in the non-physical copy than to be the original.

So indeed, Plato's thinking was instrumental - just in the opposite manner as he intended (Plato was very keen on originality and looked down upon the notion of images as representations of the original).

And I agree - narrowing down the classes of simulation is a worthwhile pursuit, and one with considerable potential for success. IIRC there's been some good papers already proving we can't be in a simulation running on classical computing architecture.

In any case, good luck with your future experiments!