In context, that seemed like the obvious meaning for you to have been aiming for.
Both yes and no. In my line of work, artifacts are things we look for in analyzing a business process. So it's not a negative so much as an attribute of their universe we are happy to find so we can handle it.
Well, to be honest, that's assuming there *is* a rendering process. But, you can run a simulation without ever writing out the moment-to-moment state of the simulation. Your experience does not need to be written to "screen" - everything you experience may be in memory/processor.
Again, yes and no. If I was rendering to a central view screen, that's the more obvious use of a rendering process. MOBs in a game don't actually need to see each other, as they are aware of each other's X,Y, and Z natively.
However, if I was writing an AI as its own object/entity in a FPS, I may indeed need to write a rendering process so it can "see" the universe and then it's object recognition sequence can execute and interpret what it "sees". Game programmers skip that crap, because the AI and the game world are on the same plane of operation, so they can cut corners.
But if you were building an autonomous robot, you'd need a camera and an optical parsing engine to interpret what it sees into stuff it can respond to.
You could then disconnect the video camera, and connect it's brain to your Xbox's HDMI jack and make it play Halo (because it recieves a comparable visual image that it then inteprets into walls, people ,etc).
At this point, you have a universe (the game) that is going through a reaction/rendering cycle, and a separate process (the robot brain) that is unwittingly interacting with it.
Now when we go to super-technology, both the game world and the robot brain (AI) are running on the same super-duper computer, and in fact, the AI is part of the regular simulation.
So, it's like the rendering sequence (photons) is serving the AI's need to see and be self-contained from the simulation, while the AIs are actually made of the simulation. Kind of like the guy who made an 8 bit computer inside of Minecraft.
Hypothetically, the photons exist because it's the only way any entity could "see" another entity in order to interact with it (or avoid falling into lava and dying).
Bear in mind, programmers often employ a concept of separation of church and state in our code. One module (the AI) isn't allowed to know about or talk to other modules except through interfaces we devise for the purpose. So while in a game, the bad guy knows you're in the room behind the door because the programmer didn't separate that, we might code it that the bad guy doesn't know anything, except that we can trace a line from his eye toward the direction he is looking and if it doesn't reach you, he doesn't respond to you. That separation is what invokes more "real life" behavior.
Intent? If you're looking to see "intent" in the structure of the Universe, you're definitely in the philosophical, rather than the scientific.
Again, yes and no. Something that is an exception to the norm may indicate intent, rather than random coincidence. One does not usually find a brick sitting in a house. But when you see it next to a door, it is no longer random as somebody just left it there, now there's a strong probability that it was to prop the door open, because that's what one might do.
Just as we don't expect to find a brick in the middle of a cow pasture. Just sitting there. it's not likely to happen. Which means somebody put it there. Lacking any proximity to anything a brick might be useful, it's just sort of random and we cannot deduce a purpose. Unlike the brick in a house next to a door that won't stay open.
It's possible the weirdness of photons is more like a brick in a field than a brick next to a door (or that they're very much less like a man-made brick given that they are as unnatural as quarks and protons).
