Stephen Wolfram

Let's have a formal theory about that.

And so there'd been this 300-year run of using mathematical equations to describe the natural world, which have worked pretty well.

But I got interested in how one could generalize that notion.

You know, there is a formal theory, there are definite rules, but what structure could those rules have?

And so what I got interested in was let's generalize beyond the sort of purely mathematical rules.

And we now have this sort of notion of programming and computing and so on.

Let's use the kinds of rules that can be embodied in programs and

to as a sort of generalization of the ones that can exist in mathematics as a way to describe the world.

And so my kind of favorite version of these kinds of simple rules are these things called cellular automata.

And so typical case... So wait, what are cellular automata?

Fair enough.

So typical case of a cellular automaton, it's an array of cells that

It's just a line of discrete cells.

Each cell is either black or white.

And in a series of steps that you can represent as lines going down a page, you're updating the color of each cell according to a rule that depends on the color of the cell above it and to its left and right.

So it's really simple.

So a thing might be if the cell and its right neighbor

are not the same and or the cell on the left is black or something, then make it black on the next step.

And if not, make it white.

Typical rule.