Stephen Wolfram

But you can see there's a little bit of regularity over on the left.

But there's a lot of stuff here that just looks very complicated, very random.

And that's a big sort of shock to, was a big shock to my intuition, at least, that that's possible.

The mind immediately starts, is there a pattern?

There must be a repetitive pattern.

There must be, that's where the mind goes.

So indeed, that's what I thought at first.

And I thought, well, this is kind of interesting, but if we run it long enough, we'll see, something will resolve into something simple.

And, you know, I did all kinds of analysis of using mathematics, statistics, cryptography, whatever, to try and crack it.

And I never succeeded.

And after I hadn't succeeded for a while, I started thinking, maybe there's a real phenomenon here that is the reason I'm not succeeding.

Maybe, I mean, the thing that for me was sort of a motivating factor is

Whereas looking at the natural world and seeing all this complexity that exists in the natural world, the question is, where does it come from?

What secret does nature have that lets it make all this complexity that we humans, when we engineer things, typically are not making?

We're typically making things that at least look quite simple to us.

And so the shock here was, even from something very simple, you're making something that complex.

Maybe this is getting at sort of the secret that nature has that allows it to make really complex things, even though its underlying rules may not be that complex.

How did it make you feel?

The truth of every sort of science discovery is it's not that gradual.

I mean, I've spent, I happen to be interested in scientific biography kinds of things.