Stephen Wolfram

It does those 10 to the 100 steps.

But for us to work out what it's gonna do, we have no way to reduce that computation.

The only way to do the computation, to see the result of the computation, is to do it.

And if we're operating within the universe, there's no opportunity to do that, because the universe is doing it as fast as the universe can do it, and that's what's happening.

So what we're trying to do, and a lot of the story of science, a lot of other kinds of things,

is finding pockets of reducibility.

That is, you could have a situation where everything in the world is full of computational irreducibility.

We never know what's gonna happen next.

The only way we can figure out what's gonna happen next is just let the system run and see what happens.

So in a sense, the story of most kinds of science, inventions, a lot of kinds of things, is the story of finding these places where we can locally jump ahead.

And one of the features of computational reducibility is there are always pockets of reducibility.

There are always an infinite number of places where you can jump ahead.

There's no way where you can jump completely ahead, but there are little patches, little places where you can jump ahead a bit.

And I think we can talk about physics project and so on, but I think the thing we realize is we kind of exist in a slice of all the possible computational irreducibility in the universe.

We exist in a slice where there's a reasonable amount of predictability.

In a sense, as we try and construct these kind of higher levels of abstraction, symbolic representations and so on, what we're doing is we're finding these lumps of reducibility that we can kind of attach ourselves to and about which we can kind of have fairly simple narrative things to say.

Because in principle, you know, I say what's going to happen in the next few seconds?

You know, oh, there are these molecules moving around in the air in this room.

And oh, gosh, it's an incredibly complicated story.

And that's a whole computationally reducible thing, most of which I don't care about.