wolfram
4 excerpts · 04-information
- surprised me, this is another sort of story of my life in science. I worked on cellular automata back in the early 80s. It's kind of a funny fact is that this was days before the internet so you couldn't look things up as easily, or at least before the web. And people had seen that I was working on cellular automata. So I got invited to all the theoretical biology conferences because they figured this must be about biological kinds of things. And it's kind of funny because— Stephen Wolfram's Radical Theory of Everything
- rules for building these patterns that you make in cellular automata. So the obvious question was, could you evolve those rules like natural selection does? Could you make mutations and selection and so on on those underlying rules? And could you see that produce some sort of interesting patterns of growth. So I tried that in 1985. I didn't find anything interesting. Do you mind explaining how you tried that? Because look, the way that it works with— Stephen Wolfram's Radical Theory of Everything
- Yes, yes. I mean, well, that's a complicated issue because it depends on what subpart of the rules you end up selecting as you make this pattern. I mean it's usually the case that when you produce some pattern from a cellular automaton for example, every little subpart is typically using only some small subset of the rules and it's using them in some particular way and it maybe makes some periodic little subpart and then something comes along that's using some— Stephen Wolfram's Radical Theory of Everything
- of ruleological society or something where we can kind of accumulate this kind of information. I think it's a thing where, I mean, one of the things I do and the things that I write about science is every picture in everything I write, you can click that picture, you'll get a piece of Wolfram language code. And at least if our QA department didn't mess up, it will forever produce the picture that I said it produced, so to speak. And I mentioned the QA department because— Stephen Wolfram's Radical Theory of Everything