Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Everything You See Is a Computational Process, If You Know How to Look - Lance Fortnow, Wired

We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful. The reverse implication is that for someone without a vast enough intellect, processes such as a coin flip would appear random. The language of computation lets us formalize this connection.

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