each other, but if you set a bunch of balls in motion, the resulting patternsare quite intricate.”For those of you familiar with chaos theory and fractals, this descriptionshould sound familiar. This is precisely how fractals are grown—runextremely simple equations, plug the answer back into the equation, andrepeat the procedure over and over again, thousands, perhaps even millionsof times. Chaotic systems, such as weather systems, coastlines, and stock market prices, are modeled using similar equations. Results plotted on agraph are very fractal-like in nature.Universal computation would be an even more fecund explanation of theway things are
if
it could be demonstrated that interactions of cells at thislowest level of computation would generate higher levels of complexity,somewhat analogous to what we see from a bird’s eye view as massivenumbers of CA cells interact. Perhaps an advanced version of CA usingMathematica might be able to generate models of interacting processes ateven higher levels of organization, up from those described by physics,through chemistry, through biology, through neurology, all the way to thesocial sciences.If, say, a form of cellular automata could generate an analog of life, artificiallife, for instance, this achievement would offer strong circumstantialevidence for the existence of primal tiny computers at the very bottom of itall acting as seeds for everything around us.But Stephen Wolfram didn’t stop at Mathematica. We will soon have the useof Wolfram/Alpha, due to be launched in May of 2009. Rucker includedquotes from a recent telephone interview with Wolfram on his latest brainchild. Here’s Wolfram’s cogent summation:“Wolfram/Alpha isn’t really a search engine, because we compute theanswers, and we discover new truths. If anything, you might call it a platonic search engine, unearthing eternal truths that may never have beenwritten down before.”Wolfram/Alpha, is a search engine that is not a search engine. In contrast toreal search engines such as Google, that respond to a user’s request for acertain type of web page based on the words used in the query by displayinglists of web page results, Wolfram/Alpha actually carries out computations
Add a Comment