Stephen Wolfram

What's sort of interesting about that is I kind of have this thing that I say in a kind of silly way about the computational universe, which is, you know, the animals are always smarter than you are.

That is, there's always some way one of these computational systems is going to figure out how to do something, even though I can't imagine how it's going to do it.

And, you know, I didn't think I would find one that, you know, you would think after all these years that when I found sort of all possible things possible,

funky things that I would have gotten my intuition wrapped around the idea that these creatures are always, in the computational universe, are always smarter than I'm gonna be.

But- Well, they're equivalently smart, right?

That's correct.

And that makes one feel very sort of, it's humbling every time.

Because every time the thing is, you think it's gonna do this, or it's not gonna be possible to do this.

And it turns out it finds a way.

That's right.

It does not.

Yes.

And also, all these things help build intuition.

That is, if it turned out that this was repetitive after a trillion steps, that's not what I would expect.

And so we learned something from that.

No doubt.

I mean, although it's sometimes challenging.

I put out a prize in 2007 for a particular Turing machine.

that I was the simplest candidate for being a universal Turing machine.

And the young chap in England named Alex Smith, after a smallish number of months, said, I've got a proof.