Stephen Wolfram

And you run it.

And big discovery that I made in the early 80s is that even extremely simple programs

when you run them, can do really complicated things.

Really surprised me.

It took me several years to kind of realize that that was a thing, so to speak.

But that realization that even very simple programs can do incredibly complicated things that we very much don't expect,

That discovery, I mean, I realized that that's very much, I think, how nature works.

That is, nature has simple rules, but yet does all sorts of complicated things that we might not expect.

A big thing of the last few years has been understanding that that's how the whole universe and physics works, but that's a quite separate topic.

But so there's this whole world of programs and what they do, and very rich, sophisticated things that these programs can do.

But when we look at many of these programs, we look at them and say, well, I don't really know what that's doing.

It's not a very human kind of thing.

So on the one hand, we have sort of what's possible in the computational universe.

On the other hand, we have the kinds of things that we humans think about, the kinds of things that are developed in kind of our intellectual history.

And really, the challenge to sort of making things computational is to connect what's computationally possible out in the computational universe with the things that we humans sort of typically think about with our minds.

Now, that's a complicated kind of moving target because the things that we think about change over time.

We've learned more stuff.

We've invented mathematics.

We've invented various kinds of ideas and structures and so on.

So it's gradually expanding.