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Lecture by Stephen Wolfram

March 18, 2003

I went to a lecture by Stephen Wolfram yesterday at Boston University. I was really impressed by his content and delivery - so many advanced topics explained fluidly and smoothly. I was also amazed at the thoroughness and completeness of his ideas; even during the question and answer period, he spoke with so much applicable detail that his answers seemed no different than prepared lecture. He also knew his subject matter extremely intimately, which I guess is somewhat of a given since he essentially created it himself, and has spend the last 10 years working on his tome, "A New Kind of Science" (which, incidentally, was on my Amazon.com wishlist for about two years by the time it was finally published).

For those who don't know, Wolfram has basically discovered that much of the complexity we see in nature and science may arise from interactions of what are essentially simple computer programs. By 'computer programs', Wolfram means a more general sense of computability than something that runs on a CPU. Much of his work is based in cellular automata, which are usually represented as a grid of cells, and the state of one cell depends on the state of its neighboring cells. These basic ideas have ramifications in physics, biology, and even thought and free will. I can hardly do justice to his ideas in a blog entry, or without getting into the finer details of computational equivalence and irreducibility, so you'll have to be inspired to check out his work on your own.

As a person, Wolfram is quite remarkable, having received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics when he was 20, and made many important contributions to physics around that age. He is also the creator of Mathematica, and he founded Wolfram Research in 1986.

In my quest to create BaseAgent, Wolfram, Mathematica, and A New Kind of Science are certainly inspirations to me.

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