Stephen Wolfram

And it had these instructions.

I probably still remember all of its machine instructions.

Yeah.

And it didn't really like dealing with floating point numbers or anything like that.

And so I had to simplify this model of particles bouncing around in a box.

And so I thought, well, I'll put them on a grid and I'll make the things just sort of move one square at a time and so on.

And so I did the simulation.

And the result was it didn't look anything like the actual pictures on the book.

Now, many years later, in fact, very recently, I realized that the thing I'd simulated was actually an example of a whole sort of computational irreducibility story that I absolutely did not recognize at the time.

At the time, it just looked like it did something random and it looks wrong, as opposed to it did something random and it's super interesting that it's random.

But I didn't recognize that at the time.

And so as it was at the time, I got interested in particle physics and I got interested in other kinds of physics.

But this whole second law of thermodynamics thing, this idea that sort of orderly things tend to degrade into disorder,

continued to be something I was really interested in, and I was really curious, for the whole universe, why doesn't that happen all the time?

We start off in the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe with this thing that seems like it's this very disordered collection of stuff, and then it spontaneously forms itself into galaxies and creates all of this complexity and order in the universe.

And so I was very curious how that happens.

But I was always kind of thinking this is kind of somehow the second order of thermodynamics is behind it trying to sort of pull things back into disorder, so to speak.

And how was order being created?

And so actually I was interested, this is probably now 1980, I got interested in kind of this galaxy formation and so on in the universe.

I also at that time was interested in neural networks and I was interested in kind of how brains make complicated things happen and so on.