Stephen Wolfram

SEPTEMBER 9, 2021

At the level of individual events, ideas from the theory and practice of computation are useful. Events are like functions, whose “arguments” are incoming tokens, and whose output is one or more outgoing tokens. And the same issue arose for Alonzo Church’s lambda calculus (introduced around 1930).

Physics 65

Physics Science Sciences Mathematics 65

Stephen Wolfram

SEPTEMBER 9, 2021

At the level of individual events, ideas from the theory and practice of computation are useful. Events are like functions, whose “arguments” are incoming tokens, and whose output is one or more outgoing tokens. And the same issue arose for Alonzo Church’s lambda calculus (introduced around 1930).

Science 64

Science Sciences Physics Mathematics 64

Stephen Wolfram

AUGUST 22, 2023

It didn’t help that his knowledge of physics was at best spotty (and, for example, I don’t think he ever really learned calculus). “Lick” Licklider —who persuaded Ed to join BBN to “teach them about computers”. Nowadays we’d call it the trie (or prefix tree) data structure. But his name shows up from time to time.

Computer 68

Computer Physics Science Sciences 68

Stephen Wolfram

FEBRUARY 3, 2023

Sometimes textbooks will gloss over everything; sometimes they’ll give some kind of “common-sense-but-outside-of-physics argument”. Once one has the idea of “equilibrium”, one can then start to think of its properties as purely being functions of certain parameters—and this opens up all sorts of calculus-based mathematical opportunities.

Computer 92

Computer Energy Physics Construction 92

Stephen Wolfram

NOVEMBER 10, 2021

Because it implies that whatever “computational parametrization” or “computational description language” one uses for the ruliad, one will almost always get something that can be viewed as “computationally equivalent”. But what about other models of computation—like cellular automata or register machines or lambda calculus?

Physics 122

Physics Mathematics Computer Construction 122