Continuing our discussion of fractals, digital physics, self-replicating spacecraft, cellular automatons, and von Neumann machines, this is view of a different part of the Mandelbrot Set (produced with a different viewer). Answer to the question at the end of yesterday’s IG photo post involves Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica fame. His company, Wolfram Research, makes the Wolfram Cloud Programming Language, a potential competitor to something IBM Watson-like, which we discussed in an earlier blog post.
This language powers Wolfram Alpha, which is currently part of Apple Siri. So, if you’ve used Siri you’ve probably used this software. When not developing technology that became part of Siri, Stephen Wolfram wrote a bestselling (and somewhat controversial) book on Cellular Automatons, A New Type of Science.
In one information-centric view of the universe attributed to Wheeler and others (sometimes called “digital physics”) the universe can be thought of as a collection of cellular automatons (or, equivalently, a Turing machine or perhaps a quantum computer). It might even be an algorithm searching all possible universes (or, in another conception, a genetic algorithm operating on the grandest scales.) This brings us back to data science, but we’ll have to save these “big question” ideas for future posts, and return to more practical data science applications. In the meantime, we’ll let readers ponder: To paraphrase Einstein, does God play data scientist with the universe? 🙂
A version of this article originally appeared as a photo post on our Instagram feed.