Stephen Wolfram

And, you know, the typical mode of...

I mean, he always used to say, and I now think about this because I'm about the age that he was when I worked with him.

And, you know, I see the people who are one third my age, so to speak.

And he was always complaining that I was one third his age and therefore various things.

But, you know, he would do some calculation by hand, you know, on Blackboard and things, come up with some answer.

I'd say, I don't understand this.

You know, I do something with a computer and he'd say, you know, I don't understand this.

So there'd be some big argument about what was, you know, what was going on.

But it was always, and I think actually,

many of the things that we sort of realized about quantum computing that were sort of issues that have to do particularly with the measurement process are kind of still issues today.

And I kind of find it interesting.

It's a funny thing in science that these, you know, that there's a remarkable, it happens in technology too, there's a remarkable sort of repetition of history that ends up occurring.

Eventually things really get nailed down.

But it often takes a while and it often things come back decades later.

Well, for example, I could tell a story actually happened right down the street from here.

When we were both at Thinking Machines, I had been working on this particular cellular automaton called Rule 30 that has this feature that from very simple initial conditions, it makes really complicated behavior.

And actually, of all silly physical things, using this big parallel computer called the Connection Machine that that company was making, I generated this giant printout of Rule 30 on the same kind of printer that people use to make...

layouts for microprocessors.

So one of these big, you know, large format printers with high resolution and so on.

So, okay, so print this out, lots of very tiny cells.