A Computer Scientist's View of Life, the Universe, and Everything

1999/04/13 by Juergen Schmidhuber · 4 voices · 3 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #cs.CC #cs.CY #physics.comp-ph #physics.pop-ph #quant-ph

paper · pdf

published as In C. Freksa, ed., Foundations of Computer Science: Potential - Theory - Cognition, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 201-208, Springer, 1997 · 9 pages, no figures

arxiv created 1999/04/13 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30

Abstract

Is the universe computable? If so, it may be much cheaper in terms of information requirements to compute all computable universes instead of just ours. I apply basic concepts of Kolmogorov complexity theory to the set of possible universes, and chat about perceived and true randomness, life, generalization, and learning in a given universe.

Cited by

• Turing completeness [wikipedia]
• Digital physics [wikipedia]
• Generative science [wikipedia]

Discussions

• A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Everything (1999) [hn, 202 points, 73 comments]
• A Computer Scientist's View of Life, the Universe, and Everything [hn, 3 points, 0 comments]
• A Computer Scientist's View of Life, the Universe, and Everything [hn, 1 points, 0 comments]
• "It may be much cheaper to compute all computable universes instead of just ours. I apply Kolmogorov complexity theory to the set of possible universes, and chat about perceived and true randomness, l [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]

Related

• Introducing the Computable Universe
• On the intelligibility of the universe and the notions of simplicity, complexity and irreducibility
• Information, complexity, brains and reality (Kolmogorov Manifesto)
• The universe as quantum computer
• Is the Universe roughly-tuned for computing?