One way that cosmologists can test their understanding of the universe is to see if any of their theoretical descriptions of the formation of structure correspond to the structure of the actual universe as measured, for example, by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Las Campanas Redshift Survey or the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey.

Current theories (2001) predict that the universe should look like the computer simulation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey below, and at present the predictions correspond to what is observed in the surveys above. Observations do not correspond to galaxies scattered at random, illustrated in the bottom simulation, because randomly placed galaxies do not display the observed web-like structure. Any theory predicting that galaxies are distributed randomly must therefore be wrong. Computer simulations of large scale structure in three-dimensions have been developed by the Virgo Project, and the Grand Challenge Cosmology Consortium, among others.

Computer simulations that run on a PC are available that will allow the user to understand the physics that creates the web-like structure with clusters and voids clearly seen in the simulations below.