Euclidean Dynamical Triangulation revisited: is the phase transition really 1st order?

The transition between the two phases of 4D Euclidean Dynamical Triangulation [1] was long believed to be of second order until in 1996 first order behavior was found for sufficiently large systems [5, 9]. However, one may wonder if this finding was affected by the numerical methods used: to control volume fluctuations, in both studies [5, 9] an artificial harmonic potential was added to the action and in [9] measurements were taken after a fixed number of accepted instead of attempted moves which introduces an additional error. Finally the simulations suffer from strong critical slowing down which may have been underestimated