Terence Tao

It doesn't contradict any of the laws of physics.

So it's sort of evidence that this thing is possible.

There are other groups who are

now pursuing ways to make Navisworks blow up, which are nowhere near as ridiculously complicated as this.

They actually are pursuing much closer to the direct self-similar model, which can, it doesn't quite work as is, but there could be some simpler scheme than what I just described to make this work.

I mean, that's a big leap.

So there's precedent.

I mean, so the thing about mathematics is that it's really good at spotting connections between what you might think of as completely different things

problems.

But if the mathematical form is the same, you can draw a connection.

So there's a lot of work previously on what's called cellular automata, the most famous of which is Conway's Game of Life.

There's this infinite discrete grid, and at any given time, the grid is either occupied by a cell or it's empty.

And there's a very simple rule that tells you how these cells evolve.

So sometimes cells live and sometimes they die.

And when I was a student, it was a very popular screensaver to actually just have these animations going.

And they look very chaotic.

In fact, they look a little bit like turbulent flow sometimes.

But at some point, people discovered more and more interesting structures within this game of life.

So, for example, they discovered this thing called a glider.

So a glider is a very tiny configuration of like four or five cells.