Word: automata
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...past life, Matthew Spotnitz was a Quantum Cellular Automata Architect—for six months at NASA during the year after his high school graduation. (In response to an FM request to clarify what exactly a Quantum Cellular Automata Architect does, Spotnitz answered, “A Quantum Cellular Automata Architect designs circuit patterns with Quantum Cellular Automata.”) “I was surrounded by PhDs at NASA’s JPL [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory] in Pasadena,” the chemistry concentrator explains. “And I had only taken AP physics...
...color when drawing the corresponding pixel in the next row; if not, keep it the same. By automatically applying the rule on each row as it moves down the screen (thus the term automaton), the computer builds up a pattern of remarkable complexity. Some of Wolfram's cellular automata made patterns that looked amazingly like those on seashells; others resembled snowflakes or leaves. "That got me wondering," he says. "Could it be that natural systems work in a similar...
...began exploring hundreds of different kinds of cellular automata and was astonished to find that the patterns emerging from his computer resembled all sorts of scientific phenomena--the subatomic trails emerging from a particle accelerator, the diagrams of curved space-time that arise from Einstein's equations, the spread of evolutionary changes in organisms through time, the graphic equivalent of different kinds of mathematical logic. "Under every conceptual rock I turned over," says Wolfram, "there's been this amazing wildlife I never expected to find...
...alone a living cell), the success of his simple programs made Wolfram suspect that science has been heading in the wrong direction for the past 300 years or so. Instead of trying to write complicated equations for everything, he says, scientists should have been searching instead for the cellular automata that correspond to what they are observing...
...final verdict on whether Wolfram's New Kind of Science is truly revolutionary--or whether cellular automata merely resemble rather than describe the world--will have to wait until scientists can digest it fully. And that could take a while. "Each idea in the book," says Sejnowski, "will take at least 10 years to explore and test." Provocative as Wolfram's theories are, he says, it's whether they agree with nature that will be the ultimate test...