Stephen Wolfram

So this is a generalization of that in which instead of having pairs, you have arbitrary and tuples.

That's it.

That's the whole story.

And now the question is, okay, so that might represent the state of the universe.

How does the universe evolve?

What does the universe do?

And so the answer is that what I'm looking at is transformation rules on these hypergraphs.

In other words, you say this, whenever you see a piece of this hypergraph that looks like this,

turn it into a piece of a hypergraph that looks like this.

So on a graph, it might be, when you see the subgraph, when you see this thing with a bunch of edges hanging out in this particular way, then rewrite it as this other graph, okay?

And so that's the whole story.

So the question is, what, so now you say, I mean,

As I say, this is quite abstract.

And one of the questions is, where do you do those updating?

So you've got this giant graph.

Okay, so the question is, where do you do the updates?

And the answer is, the rule is, you do them wherever they apply.

And you do them, the order in which the updates is done is not defined.

That is, you can do them.

So there may be many possible orderings for these updates.