''Calculating Space'' () is

Konrad Zuse Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse (; ; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, List of pioneers in computer science, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programm ...

's 1969 book on

automata theory Automata theory is the study of abstract machines and automata, as well as the computational problems that can be solved using them. It is a theory in theoretical computer science with close connections to cognitive science and mathematical l ...

. He proposed that all processes in the

universe The universe is all of space and time and their contents. It comprises all of existence, any fundamental interaction, physical process and physical constant, and therefore all forms of matter and energy, and the structures they form, from s ...

are computational. This view is known today as the simulation hypothesis, digital philosophy,

digital physics Digital physics is a speculative idea suggesting that the universe can be conceived of as a vast, digital computation device, or as the output of a deterministic or probabilistic computer program. The hypothesis that the universe is a digital com ...

pancomputationalism Digital physics is a speculative idea suggesting that the universe can be conceived of as a vast, digital computation device, or as the output of a deterministic or probabilistic computer program. The hypothesis that the universe is a digital comp ...

. Zuse proposed that the

is being computed by some sort of

cellular automaton A cellular automaton (pl. cellular automata, abbrev. CA) is a discrete model of computation studied in automata theory. Cellular automata are also called cellular spaces, tessellation automata, homogeneous structures, cellular structures, tessel ...

or other discrete computing machinery, challenging the long-held view that some physical laws are continuous by nature. He focused on cellular automata as a possible substrate of the computation, and pointed out that the classical notions of

entropy Entropy is a scientific concept, most commonly associated with states of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty. The term and the concept are used in diverse fields, from classical thermodynamics, where it was first recognized, to the micros ...

and its growth do not make sense in deterministically computed universes.

References

External links

Jürgen Schmidhuber Jürgen Schmidhuber (born 17 January 1963) is a German computer scientist noted for his work in the field of artificial intelligence, specifically artificial neural networks. He is a scientific director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artifici ...

'
site
Zuse's book and 1967 paper.
''Calculating Space'' - a painting by Zuse
- Konrad Zuse's visualization of the idea
Web article and simulation of such a calculating space in C and LIBPNG

SecondSpace
Simulation of waves within a 2D space (time and space are discrete), similar to FDTD. An OpenCL graphic card is needed. Theoretical computer science Konrad Zuse 1969 non-fiction books Physics books Cellular automata {{physics-book-stub

See also

References

Further reading

External links