I am currently trying to understand the origins of the notion of
computable universes.
It seems that Konrad Zuse himself (the "inventor of the computer"
who built the first digital machines in the 1930s and
completed the first working programmable computer in 1941 and
created the first higher-level programming language in 1945)
was also the first to propose that the physical universe
is just "Computing Space" (Rechnender Raum) implemented on a
grid of computers, each communicating with its neighbors. Today
this would be called a cellular automaton. The reference is:
Zuse, Konrad: Rechnender Raum, Schriften zur Datenverarbeitung,
Band 1. Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig (1969).
I also found references to Fredkin's similar but more recent ideas.
Centuries earlier Leibniz already caused a stir by claiming that
everything is computable. Apparently the computer pioneers found
it natural to think along such lines - Leibniz not only coinvented
calculus (with Newton) but also built the first mechanical
multiplier in 1670. (Perhaps the first mechanical calculator was
Pascal's adder in 1640, although daVinci may have designed one in
1500).
I am also interested in pointers to early fiction. For decades
SF authors have been writing about downloading minds onto machines.
And when I was a kid in the 1970s (?) I heard a fictional play on the
radio (maybe British?) about researchers in a submarine who discover
that they are actually living in a rather crude computer simulation.
I came across variants of this theme again and again in numerous
more recent SF novels - but who was the first to write down such
ideas?
I welcome all sorts of references to related early work.
Juergen Schmidhuber
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/
Received on Mon Apr 15 2002 - 07:23:49 PDT