Michael Levin

And I wanted to use it as a model system for honing our abilities to take a new system and looking at it with fresh eyes.

And that's because the sorting algorithms have been studied for over 60 years.

We all think we know what they do and what their properties are.

The algorithm itself is just a few lines of code.

You know, you can see exactly what's there.

It's deterministic.

And so that's why, right?

I wanted the most shock value out of a system like that if we were to find anything and to use it as an example of taking something minimal and seeing what can be gotten out of it.

So I'll describe two interesting things about it.

And then we have lots of other work coming in the next year about even simpler systems.

I mean, it's great.

actually crazy.

So the very first thing is this, the standard sorting.

So let's take bubble sort, right?

And all these sorting algorithms, you know, what you're starting out with is an array of jumbled up digits.

Okay, so integers, it's an array of mixed up integers.

And what the algorithm does

is designed to do is to eventually arrange them all into order.

And what it does generally is compare some pieces of that array and based on which one is larger than which, it swaps them around.

And you can imagine that if you just keep doing that and you just keep comparing and swapping, then eventually you can get all the digits in the same order.