Stephen Wolfram

Now, I happen to think, I mean, you asked me at an interesting time because I'm just in the middle of starting to re-energize my project to kind of study the fundamental theory of physics.

As of today, I'm very optimistic that we're actually going to find something and that it's going to be possible to see that the universe really is computational in that sense.

But I don't know because we're betting against the universe, so to speak.

It's not like when I spend a lot of my life building technology and then I know what's in there.

It may have unexpected behavior, it may have bugs, things like that, but fundamentally I know what's in there.

For the universe...

I'm not in that position, so to speak.

So this is a slightly complicated issue because as soon as you have universal computation, you can, in principle, simulate anything with anything.

But it is not a natural thing to do.

And if you're asking, were you to try to find our physical universe by looking at possible programs in the computational universe of all possible programs,

Would the ones that correspond to our universe be small and simple enough that we might find them by searching that computational universe?

We've got to have the right basis, so to speak.

We've got to have the right language, in effect, for describing computation for that to be feasible.

So the thing that I've been interested in for a long time is, what are the most structureless structures that we can create with computation?

So in other words, if you say a cellular automaton has a bunch of cells that are arrayed on a grid, and every cell is updated in synchrony at a particular, you know, when there's a click of a clock, so to speak, and it goes a tick of a clock, and every cell gets updated at the same time.

That's a very specific, very rigid kind of thing.

But my guess is that when we look at physics and we look at things like space and time, that what's underneath space and time is something as structureless as possible.

That what we see, what emerges for us as physical space, for example, comes from something that is sort of arbitrarily unstructured underneath.

And so I've been for a long time interested in kind of what are the most structureless structures that we can set up.

And actually, what I had thought about for ages is using graphs, networks, where essentially, so let's talk about space, for example.