next up previous
Next: Preliminaries

In C. Freksa, ed., Foundations of Computer Science: Potential - Theory - Cognition

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 201-208, Springer, 1997.



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

Download postscript or gzipped postscript or PDF.

Jürgen Schmidhuber

IDSIA, Lugano, Switzerland
juergen@idsia.ch

December 1996

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.

Post publication note: Konrad Zuse was the first who seriously suggested the universe is being computed on a grid of computers or cellular automaton (digital physics); compare similar ideas by Ed Fredkin. They did not talk about computing all computable universes though. This paper and related ones are being discussed on the "everything" mailing list (everything-list@eskimo.com) created by Wei Dai. Follow this link to the archive. Pointers to more recent papers on the computable universes can be found here and here.



 

Juergen Schmidhuber
1999-03-15


Related links: In the beginning was the code! - Zuse's thesis - Algorithmic Theories of Everything - Generalized Algorithmic Information - Speed Prior - The New AI