Stephen Wolfram

It's just a thing that sits there representing a structure.

And so building up that structure, and it's turned out that structure has been extremely, it's a good match for the way that we humans, it seems to be a good match for the way that we humans kind of conceptualize higher level things.

And it's been for the last, I don't know, 45 years or something.

It's served me remarkably well.

Right.

So the sort of a very important phenomenon that is kind of a thing that I've sort of realized is just, it's one of these things that sort of in the future of kind of everything is going to become more and more important is this phenomenon of computational irreducibility.

And the question is, if you know the rules for something, you have a program, you're going to run it, you might say, I know the rules, great, I know everything about what's going to happen.

Well, in principle, you do, because you can just run those rules out and just see what they do.

You might run them a million steps, you see what happens, etc.

The question is,

Can you immediately jump ahead and say, I know what's going to happen after a million steps, and the answer is 13 or something?

And one of the very critical things to realize is, if you could reduce that computation, there is, in a sense, no point in doing the computation.

The place where you really get value out of doing the computation is when you had to do the computation to find out the answer.

But this phenomenon that you have to do the computation to find out the answer, this phenomenon of computational irreducibility seems to be tremendously important for thinking about lots of kinds of things.

So one of the things that happens is, okay, you've got a model of the universe at the low level in terms of atoms of space and hypergraphs and rewriting of hypergraphs and so on.

And it's happening 10 to the 100 times every second, let's say.

Well, you say, great, then we've nailed it.

We know how the universe works.

Well, the problem is,

the universe can figure out what it's gonna do.