''Calculating Space'' (german: Rechnender Raum) is

Konrad Zuse Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse (; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-c ...

'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. The word ''automata'' comes from the Greek word αὐτόματο� ...

. He proposed that all processes in the

universe The universe is all of space and time and their contents, including planets, stars, galaxies, and all other forms of matter and energy. The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological description of the development of the universe. Acc ...

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

digital physics Digital physics is a speculative idea 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 computer was ...

pancomputationalism Digital physics is a speculative idea 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 computer was ...

. 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, as well as a measurable physical property, that is most commonly associated with a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty. The term and the concept are used in diverse fields, from classical thermodynam ...

and its growth do not make sense in deterministically computed universes. Zuse's thesis was later expanded by German computer scientist

Jürgen Schmidhuber Jürgen Schmidhuber (born 17 January 1963) is a German computer scientist most noted for his work in the field of artificial intelligence, deep learning and artificial neural networks. He is a co-director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artif ...

in his technical report ''Algorithmic Theories of Everything''.

References

External links

'
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