Making the World Computable

A Platonic Search Engine?

By Sally Morem

Plato believed mathematics was “out there” in the world, not merely in theminds of mathematicians. So does Stephen Wolfram. He has spent his professional life translating Plato’s belief in the Eternal Forms into his own belief that the universe is composed of an inconceivable large number of computations.If this idea sounds familiar to you, perhaps you’ve read something about thework of noted physicist, Edward Fredkin. Fredkin stipulated that universal processes are discrete, that is, digital. He further stipulated that any discrete process is by definition computable. So far, so good. But, then he took hisanalysis one step further, a radical step. He claimed that our universe isactually an artifact produced by programming on a computer, although hedid decline to specify exactly who or what was doing the programming.Stephen Wolfram has never taken that last step. But he is in fundamentalagreement with Fredkin on the digital nature of the universe. Wolfram ismost noted for his long-term work on cellular automata. CA is made upessentially of tiny elements of software, or cells, with simple instructions onhow to change their state in certain very definite ways in response tochanges in their neighbors’ states. As each “generation” of computationgoes by, we see the cells winking on and off on the screen in patterns of amazing complexity.Wolfram’s work was influenced by a number of different people, but nonemore than English mathematician Alan Turing. In the 1930s, Turingconstructed a mathematical concept known as the “Turing Machine.” It’s anabstract computational device, a kind of thought experiment intended toexplore the notion of computation.What does it mean when you compute something? What does the processentail? Turing described a bare-bones version of computation involving a

simple device that moves along a paper strip, makes a mark or not accordingto a very simple memory circuit that translates neighboring marks on the paper into instructions, and then moves to the next section of paper, again inresponse to already existing marks. Each step in this process becomes onecomputation.If you combine a number of Turing Machines to make a larger machine, youcould, in theory, program them to duplicate the work of any computer. Sincethey are so much simpler and slower, duplicating the work of, say, of alaptop would take a very long time, but the work would get done eventually.This ability to mimic any operation in any computer is why mathematicianscall the Turing Machine a universal computer.By describing computation in such a fundamental way, Turing helped trigger the computer revolution that began during World War II and is continuing ataccelerating speed to revolutionize life in the 21

century. The relationship between the Turing Machine and the computations going on in CA areobvious.Wolfram took the insights he gained working on CA to developMathematica, a software package that permits a scientist to visually map anenormous amount of data onto a large variety of appropriate graphs. By sodoing, the scientist gains a much more intuitive sense of what that data istrying to say from many different angles.And then came Wolfram’s enormous doorstop of a book, “A New Kind of Science,” (NKS) in which he put his hard-earned knowledge from CA andMathematica to the test. In it, he worked out his own version of Fredkin’sastonishing hypothesis on the nature of the universe. Essentially, he saidthat the universe is a computer, built up of a rich medium of innumerabletiny computers that act very much like those cells found in CA. Massively parallel processing with a vengeance.Rudy Rucker, in his recent article on Wolfram, summarizes the idea nicely:“Given the world’s apparent complexity, it seems counterintuitive that theworld could be based on simple rules. But computer scientists like Wolframhave amply demonstrated that simple rules can in fact generate complex behavior. An example: a simple rule describes how billiard balls bounce off

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

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