Abstract :
Whereas once the world view of the ancient world was shifted by Pythagorean mathematics, scientific knowledge and human perception has been contested in the 21st century by developments in computation. In his ground-breaking book Stephen Wolfram, the British physicist and creator of the Mathematica program, asserted that the complexity of the universe could be clearly understood in terms of simple programs. Here in an exclusive extract, Wolfram describes how one of the most straightforward programs, cellular automata, despite adhering to simple rules, yields some surprisingly complex results
Keywords :
Richard Feynman , Gottfried W Leibniz , John Wheeler , Monadology , A New Kind of Science , Principle of Computational Equivalence , Wilhelm Johannsen , cellular automata , Church-Turing Thesis , John von Neumann , planetary automata , Alfonso Church , Universal Computer , Kevin Sipes , Alan Turing , Universal Constructor , Karl Chu , DNA code , biomachinic mutation , Human Genome Project , algorithm , Craig Venter , Gregory Chaitin , Celera Corporation , information-theoretic conception , William Bateson , biogenetics , xenoarchitecture , Universal Turing Machine , morphodynamical and morphogenetic systems , Internet , Post-Human Era , Stuart Kauffman , monadology , Adjacent Possible , Ray Kurzweil
