Neil Gershenfeld

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1,202 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2023 last heard May 2023

Neil Gershenfeld’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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To be universal, you need a persistent state.

You need a nonlinear operation to interact them.

And you need connectivity.

So that's what you need to show computational universality.

So they showed that a CA modeling billiard balls is a universal computer.

Chris Moore went on to show that instead of chaos, Turing showed there are problems in computation that you can't solve.

that they're harder than you can't predict.

They're actually in a deep reason that they are unsolvable.

Chris Moore showed it's very easy to make physical systems that are uncomputable, that what the physics system does

just bouncing balls and surfaces, you can make systems that solve uncomputable problems.

And so almost any non-trivial physical system is computationally universal.

So the first part of the answer to your question is, this comes back to my comment about how do you bootstrap a civilization?

You just don't need much to be computationally universal.

So then there isn't today a notion of like fabricational universality or fabricational complexity.

The sort of numbers I've been giving you about you eating lunch versus the chip fab, sort of that's in the same spirit of what Shannon did.

But once you connect computational universality

to kind of fabricational universality, you then get the ability to grow and adapt and evolve.

Yeah, and so that's why, for me, the heart of this whole conversation is morphogenesis.

So just to come back to that, what Turing ended his sadly cut short life studying,

was how genes give rise to form.

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