Stephen Wolfram, the inventor of the mathematical programming system Wolfram Language, thinks there might be intelligent life, of a sort, in the digits of pi. He spoke recently at the SETI Institute about what his “principle of computational equivalence” means for non-human intelligence — check out the heady hour-and-a-half lecture below.
The key thread running through his concept is that simple rules underpin complex behavior. For Wolfram, the pigmentation patterns on a mollusk shell, for example, aren’t necessarily the outcome of deliberate evolutionary forces. “I think the mollusk is going out into the computational universe, finding a random program, and running it and printing it on its shell,” Wolfram says in the lecture. “If I’m right, the universe is just like an elaborate version of the digits of pi.” (There is some debate, of course, over just how right Wolfram is — though you won’t really get that from the lecture.)
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