X-Message-Number: 19400 From: Date: Wed, 3 Jul 2002 07:34:37 EDT Subject: Re: CryoNet #19385 Heavy reading --part1_14a.10422cde.2a543b4d_boundary Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Robert Ettinger said in message # 19385: > > After a few hours of rummaging around in it, I'm still not really sure what > > it's about, but if I had to hazard a guess, I would have to say it's mainly > > about the implications of cellular automata and the way in which apparently > > simple algorithms can lead to complex and unexpected, perhaps > unforeseeable, > results Wolfram book is about the nihilist (nothingness) theory of the universe first put forward by John Hornton Conway. The "computing world" is the first "interesting" thing in nothing, the system unfolds that way: At start there is nothing, so you ask: What is the content of nothing? It is zero, next you ask at the second order what is the quantity between zero and nothing (or what is the content of interaction between nothing and zero). The answer is a undefined quantity different from zero. A quantity different from all defined quantities is the infinite. So we have a computing system with zero and infinite. Next you can only degenerate it and after infinite you start again with 0. So you have the unended string: 0 infinite 0 infinite 0 .... Think you write it down on a paper strip, when the strip is very many light-year long it may bent and eventualy cross itself. If you don't look too far away, this is a two strip system. Call the first the data strip and the second the program strip, you have a Turing machine, a universal computer. For compactness we can write infinite as 1 so the strip looks as a binary string: 010101... The computer will exchange some 0 to 1 and 1 to 0. You can think of 01010... chunks as the numbering of quantum dimensions: The first is 0, the second 01, then comes 010, 0101,.... The Turing machine with produce other spaces. At the botton, Wolfram work is about the making of these other spaces. He has read about J.H. Conway, but it is not clear if he has understood him. For me, I think we have a lot to learn about the single string 010101... without any added philosophy. I think the biggest impact of Wolfram will remain Mathematica. Imagine a world where everybody would be able to master nearly all maths in the world with the learning of a single software. That is possible with Mathematica and its add on. Yvan Bozzonetti. --part1_14a.10422cde.2a543b4d_boundary Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19400