Moskito Island, Caribbean. Edward Fredkin organizes an informal symposium on Cellular Automata Machines (CAM), with the contribution of the young mathematician Stephen Wolfram (a PhD from CalTech at just 20 years old), who will found Wolfram Research, which in 1987 will produce Mathematica, a powerful mathematical analysis software tool. Like Fredkin, Wolfram agrees that the complexity of the natural world may have originated from simple algorithmic rules, possibly just one. He estimates that a single cellular automation run 10^400 times is sufficient to reproduce the entire complexity of the known laws of physics. Wolfram will publish an article soon after and a book many years later, in 2002: “A New Kind of Science,” his approach to the theory of everything, to find the original rule, “the automation that rule them all.” He resurfaced in 2020 with the idea that automata are not just crude simulations of life, but the very essence of life. This idea would also be developed by the Norwegian-Italian Nils Aall Barricelli, who works on symbiogenesis: organisms collaborating in the evolution of species. Barricelli’s microuniverse would be developed within a von Neumann machine.
