The Computational Structure of Programs and the Universe

Abstract

I’ll talk about my emerging new foundational understanding of computation based on three large-scale projects: (1) Our recent Physics Project, which provides a fundamentally computational model for the low-level operation of our universe, (2) My long-time investigation of the typical behavior of simple programs (such as cellular automata, combinators, etc.) in the computational universe and (3) The long-time development of the Wolfram Language as a computational language to describe the world. I’ll describe my emerging concept of the multicomputational paradigm—and some of its implications for science, distributed computing, language design and the foundations of computation and mathematics.