Stephen Wolfram

From simple origins.

Yeah, from some sort of known origins.

I had the sense that what I was interested in was kind of in all these different, this sort of different cases of where complicated things were arising from rules.

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, I also looked at snowflakes and things like that.

I was curious in fluid dynamics in general.

I was just sort of curious about how does complexity arise.

And the thing that I didn't, you know, it took me a while to kind of realize that there might be a general phenomenon.

You know, I sort of assumed, oh, there's galaxies over here, there's brains over here.

They're very different kinds of things.

And so what happened, this is probably 1981 or so,

I decided, okay, I'm going to try and make the minimal model of how these things work.

And it was sort of an interesting experience because I had built, starting in 1979, I built my first big computer system, a thing called SMP, Symbolic Manipulation Program.

It's kind of a forerunner of modern orphan language.

with many of the same ideas about symbolic computation and so on.

But the thing that was very important to me about that was in building that language, I had basically tried to figure out what were the relevant computational primitives, which have turned out to stay with me for the last 40-something years.

But it was also important because in building a language is very different activity from natural science, which is what I've mostly done before.

Because in natural science, you start from the phenomena of the world and you try and figure out, so how can I make sense of the phenomena of the world?

And, you know, kind of the world presents you with what it has to offer, so to speak, and you have to make sense of it.

When you build a computer language or something, you are creating your own primitives, and then you say, so what can you make from these?