Stephen Wolfram's Keynote Address: "The core of NKS is exploring the computational universe."

Posted by Kathryn Cramer.

Stephen Wolfram gave a wide-ranging Keynote Address that touched on many (or perhaps even all) of the subjects of the papers to be presented at the conference.

The central organizing metaphor of the talk was the field of NKS as an exploration of the computational universe: The core of NKS is exploring the computational universe.

My favorite line from the talk, from the portion in which he discussed NKS and aesthetics is: We are seeing the beauty of nature but not just from our world, but from all possible worlds.

As I was listening to his talk I explored the relationship between the various items on the program today. Here is my first draft version of this. As I listen to the talks I will modify and improve upon this.

Larger versions of the graphic are available here: 1024 x 642 and 3869 x 2424.

The talk will be available later. We will post the URL when we have it.

Comments

[Kovas Boguta]

I liked Stephen's talk -- it was different from previous years. More ideas that go beyond what's in the NKS book.

One point he made was that much of the way the world currently works -- like the fact that trains run on a specific schedule -- is set up to be computationally reducible. But that the world of the future is moving towards something that is more random, yet more robust and efficient at the same time. That we cannot predict or even understand how the algorithms work, but that they somehow manage to do the right thing. This strikes me as true, and also significant.