Tom HappVerified account

This is either the most important advancement in science in the last century, or it’s the most sophisticated form of numerology. Either way, my take away from this is the universe is a recursive regex function ;) https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/ …

It's pretty amazing. He basically derived the theory of relativity from a sorting algorithm. I think even if this isn't exactly the right track for explaining the physics of our universe, it's going to be something similar to this.

It's cool to see radical approaches (especially backed by an intelligent and resourced person) but I wish he toned down the hyperbole.

Yeah also the marketing talk... it makes it harder to take the other stuff seriously

After reading more and thinking a while, this is basically a generalized Conway game of life where nothing is assumed, even the space in which it operates. Conway himself postulated that perhaps if you could zoom out far enough perhaps it could resemble something like life.

What wolfram is doing is basically laying the possibility space for all "games" and then brute force searching for one that matches our universe. So there's no model here and no predictions. Simply a mathematical framework that could possibly describe our universe, but that's all

A little ironic that this announcement came only a few days after Conway's death. He probably would have been fascinated. It's also surprising to me it took this long for someone to generalize the idea from a physics perspective since that is what was postulated so long ago