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Remembering the Improbable Life of Ed Fredkin (1934–2023) and His World of Ideas and Stories

Stephen Wolfram

Ed was never officially a “test pilot”, but he told me stories about figuring out how to take his plane higher than anyone else—and achieving weightlessness by flying his plane in a perfect free-fall trajectory by maintaining an eraser floating in midair in front of him. Then McCarthy started to explain ways a computer could do algebra.

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Can AI Solve Science?

Stephen Wolfram

In 2000 I was interested in what the simplest possible axiom system for logic (Boolean algebra) might be. Here’s how the “loss” evolves (over the course of 100 generations) for a collection of paths: And what we see is that there’s only one “winner” here that achieves zero loss; on all the other paths, evolution “gets stuck”.

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