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The Finite Nature Hypothesis of Edward Fredkin Fredkin concludes: "Given Finite Nature, what we have at the bottom is a Cellular Automaton of some kind." And, because "Automata, Cellular Automata and Finite State Machines are all forms of computers," this is to say that at the bottom of the physics of the natural world, we have a computer of some kind. Fredkin's student Roger Banks put forth in 1971 a proof that the same is true of the less conventional computer architecture of a cellular automaton. Fredkin's final point anticipates the second of his seminal papers on this subject, "A New Cosmogony," by introducing the concept of the parts of the model which by their nature are not themselves contained within physics, and so are not to be found in this universe. www.bottomlayer.com /bottom/finite-all.html   (0 words)

Edward Fredkin's theory is one not just of physics but of metaphysics: it leads to speculation about supreme beings ... Fredkin's focus was intense but undisciplined, and it tended to stray from a problem as soon as he was confident that he understood the solution in principle. Fredkin had taught for barely a year before he became a full professor, and not much later, in 1971, he was appointed the head of Project MAC—a position that was also short-lived, for in the fall of 1974 he began a sabbatical at the California Institute of Technology as a Fairchild Distinguished Scholar. Fredkin was never oblivious of the complaints that his work wasn't "worthy of MIT," nor of the movements, periodically afoot, to sever, or at least weaken, his ties to the university. psoup.math.wisc.edu /491/Fredkin.htm   (11414 words)

Amazon.com: "Edward Fredkin": Key Phrase page Edward Fredkin, who also worked at B B N, was another researcher interested in time sharing. Some theorists, notably Edward Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram, claim that reality is a program nun on a cosmic computer.22 In this view, a universal... Although he himself held no higher degrees, Fredkin was a professor associated with the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, and... www.amazon.com /phrase/Edward-Fredkin   (0 words)

Fredkin Fredkin was extremely bright, and the Air Force decided to do what they could with him, figuring that some day there'd be a payback. Adams and Fredkin are both thinking about a world in which the atom and its particles dictate the life of humankind and the nature of the universe. In some ways, as strange as Fredkin occasionally sounds, it is a pity he has chosen to be so reclusive, not to be more forthcoming with his ideas. www.pcs.cnu.edu /~gwebb/fredkin.htm   (1798 words)

Computer History Museum - Lectures - Biographies Edward Fredkin is recognized worldwide as one of the foremost authorities and developers of the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Fredkin then spent a year at Caltech as a Fairchild Distinguished Scholar, working with Richard Feynman, and was a Professor of Physics at Boston University for six years. Fredkin’s five decade career in computer science, and his early use of the DEC PDP-1 computer, make him uniquely placed to examine and assess this machine and its users in perspective. www.computerhistory.org /events/index.php?spkid=5&ssid=1142978073   (298 words)

Fredkin Modeling SARS Epidemic, Offers Advice to CDC   (Site not responding. Last check: ) Fredkin’s goal, he said, is to model the effects of possible options of containment, such as controlling airline flights or quarantining infected people, to guide health authorities in their decisions. Fredkin hopes that his model will help to determine what the consequences would be “if you change something, such as you cut down some kind of travel... Fredkin said that he was motivated by the urgency of the situation and felt that his own problem-solving abilities and those of the MIT community had the potential to have a positive effect. www-tech.mit.edu /V123/N17/17sars.17n.html   (538 words)

math lessons - Edward Fredkin   (Site not responding. Last check: ) Edward Fredkin dropped out of Caltech after one year and, at age 19, joined the USAF and became a jet fighter pilot. Fredkin’s computer career started in 1956 when the Air Force assigned him to work at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Fredkin also works at the intersection of theoretical issues in the physics of computation and computational models of physics. www.mathdaily.com /lessons/Edward_Fredkin   (353 words)

MIT - Spotlight - MIT responds to SARS Visiting scientist and former MIT professor Edward Fredkin is attempting to curb the recent spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, by using spreadsheets to model the behavior of the epidemic. Fredkin is using a collection of interconnected spreadsheets to simulate the behavior of those infected with the disease and how they might communicate the disease to others. Visiting scientist and former MIT professor Edward Fredkin is working on a computer model to reduce the impact of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus. web.mit.edu /spotlight/sars   (265 words)

Apologetics Group - Life, the Universe, and Everything Drawing from his experience with information theory, Fredkin posited that computation is the basis of reality and that the structure of the universe is supported by a massive network of cellular automata. Wright traced Fredkin's career through his years as a college dropout, a fighter pilot, a computer programmer, an inventor, and a professor, pointing out that Fredkin's unconventional training may have been what led to his ability to see things that other scientists could not. Fredkin was indeed a brilliant and intuitive thinker, one whose intellectual prowess was praised by world-renowned scientists like Richard Feynman and Marvin Minsky. d.dominodeveloper.net /gsmythe/home.nsf/f21ee91c64a30fa3882570900056e584/3d75e59f6fdc27b68825708f00659de7!OpenDocument   (1442 words)

Dr. Dobb's | If the Universe Is a Program | September 3, 2002 Fredkin reports that revered MIT physicist Phillip Morrison once said of him, "Ed Fredkin is a computer person, therefore he believes that the universe is actually a computer. Fredkin's answer is that his views are not in conflict with the data of quantum and relativistic physics; only with the accepted interpretations of those data. Fredkin apparently believes that the universal computation had a beginning and that it is reversible. www.ddj.com /184405191   (2442 words)

Wright review Fredkin's island refuge, where he runs a resort and can frequently be found contemplating his curious world view. Fredkin believes matter and energy are made from information, that it is the fundamental stuff. Fredkinism was starting to make sense to me. Sometimes the author seems like the young Woody Allen character in ''Annie Hall.'' He's too depressed to do his homework, because the universe is expanding, so what's the point? www.santafe.edu /~johnson/reviews.wright.html   (1250 words)

Digital Physics - Publications [Fre92a] Edward Fredkin, "Finite Nature", Proceeding of the XXVIIth Recontre de Moriond (1992). [Fre92b] Edward Fredkin, "A New Cosmogony", Proceedings of Workshop on Physics of Computation--PhysComp'92, IEEE Computer Society Press (1992). [Fre96] Edward Fredkin, "Digital Perspective", Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Physics and Computation, Boston University, 22-24 Nov 1996. digitalphysics.org /Publications   (942 words)

Definition of Edward Fredkin Edward Fredkin was an early pioneer of digital physics (in recent work he uses the term digital philosophy (DP)). Fredkin founded Information International Inc. and has served as the CEO of a diverse set of companies, including Information International Inc., Three Rivers Computer Corporation, New England Television Corporation (owner of Boston's then CBS affiliate, WNEV, channel 7) and others. His academic career includes a period as Director of the MIT's Project MAC (1971-1974), and professorships at MIT, Boston University and Carnegie Mellon University. www.wordiq.com /definition/Edward_Fredkin   (195 words)

Quindecim - A Reality of Computation? Hayles went on to explain that critics of Wolfram note that cellular automata have not been shown to evolve beyond one level of complexity, that his work downplays the role of evolution, and most importantly that his work does not show any actual physical mechanisms at work. Edward Fredkin, also a pioneer, is a major contributor to the field of Digital Philosophy, the theory of existence based on the idea that time and space are not continuous entities, but instead discrete. It therefore follows, according to Morowitz, that the pattern of human consciousness is all that is important to being human, and furthermore that this pattern can one day be reproduced in a digital medium. www.thequindecim.com /home/index.cfm?event=displayArticlePrinterFriendly&uStory_id=0ea2749a-707f-416a-a2ee-cc5184eaf5c0   (839 words)

A New Cosmogony [Free Republic] The only remaining alternative is to admit that God was incompetent on a scale that boggles the mind. Fredkin's pretty bright but so far experiment has shown time to be continuous. Fredkin had a pretty heavy duty thought there by any measure and seems to be making a case for the unfathomable mind of god. www.freerepublic.com /forum/a39fb9923213c.htm   (5454 words)

God Doesn't Shoot Craps by Richard Armstrong - Secret of the Universe You must believe that a “string” is so small that it bears the same relationship to the size of an atom that an oak tree bears to the size of the known physical universe. Fredkin’s theories first came to wide public attention with the publication of an article entitled “Did the Universe Just Happen?” in the The Atlantic Monthly. Professor Fredkin won’t comment on the matter, but an enterprising gentleman by the name of Ross Rhodes has created a website called www.bottomlayer.com where he draws a very plausible connection between Fredkin’s theories and the story of Christianity. www.goddoesntshootcraps.com /secret.html   (481 words)

MIT Media Lab: Colloquium Series Edward Fredkin and Richard Fredkin, "The Threat of Human Extinction" Edward Fredkin's current scientific work is in the field of discrete physics. Edward Fredkin and Richard Fredkin are collaborating on research related to these global problems. www.media.mit.edu /events/lecture-fredkin.html   (185 words)

Links & Resources in Philosophy & Physics Edward Fredkin finally took the step of posting his writings in December 2001. A group devoted to exploring Fredkin's hypothesis that the universe is a cellular automata computer program. Resources in the basics of cellular automata programming, Fredkin's papers, and further research in CA as an alternative explanation of phenomena. www.bottomlayer.com /bottom/physlink.html   (0 words)

21st-Molecular Computing The underlying premise of a Fredkin gate is that if a computation could be reversed (unwound back to its original state), then no heat would be lost because the second law of thermodynamics would not be involved. The radical notion of reversible computer logic was discovered independently by Dr. Charles Bennett of IBM, and later by Dr. Edward Fredkin of M.I.T. Dr. Fredkin and Dr. Toffolli have since proved that a computer using reversible Fredkin logic can do anything that a conventional, irreversible system can. For if Fredkin gates were able to replace the semiconductor based logic of processors entirely, they would produce a tremendous benefit in energy savings. www.vxm.com /21R.30.html   (1491 words)

The Harvard Crimson :: News :: In the Country of the Blind... Fredkin has stirred a debate in physics by proposing that the universe is fundamentally made up not of matter and energy, as commonly supposed, but of information, assembled into different forms by what he calls "programming rules." Basically, Ed Fredkin thinks the universe is a computer. Fredkin and his theory of "digital physics" provide the basis for an investigation of information in the physical sciences. For Fredkin, the lifelong rationalist, the universe itself is the vast expression of many iterations of simple but powerful ordering rules. www.thecrimson.com /printerfriendly.aspx?ref=131658   (997 words)

Digital physics at AllExperts Its proponents include Edward Fredkin, Juergen Schmidhuber, Stephen Wolfram, and Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft. They hold that the apparently probabilistic nature of quantum physics is not incompatible with the notion of computability. Thus, the assumption that the experimenter could have decided to measure different components of the spins than he actually did is, strictly speaking, not true. en.allexperts.com /e/d/di/digital_physics.htm   (720 words)

[Seth-Trips] Ed Fredkin at Stanford next Wednesday [dave@farber.net: [IP] Stanford 4:15PM * Wednesday, January 26, 2005 ... About the speaker: Edward Fredkin dropped out of Caltech after one year and, at age 19, joined the USAF and became a jet fighter pilot. He is the inventor of many things including the Trie data structue, the Fredkin Gate and the Billiard Ball Model. Fredkin and his students did pioneering work on cellular automata and reversible computing. zork.net /pipermail/seth-trips/2005-January/000832.html   (556 words)

Origins of CelLab With Edward Teller, Ulam was the coinventor of the hydrogen bomb. Although he himself holds no higher degrees, Fredkin was made a professor associated with the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, and he directed a number of dissertations on Cellular Automata. Fredkin has not published anything since then, though I have seen a draft of some notes he wrote for a Digital Information Mechanics workshop he held at Mosquito Island in 1982. www.fourmilab.ch /cellab/manual/chap5.html   (4867 words)

SCS News Releases The Fredkin Prize is being awarded under the auspices of AAAI. The prize was established at Carnegie Mellon 17 years ago by Computer Science Professor Edward Fredkin to encourage research in computer chess. Deep Blue, a parallel supercomputer that processes an average of 200 million chess positions per second, is the first chess machine to draw and beat a world chess champion in a regulation game, and the first chess machine to beat the world champion in a regulation match. www.cs.cmu.edu /~scsnews/jul25-97.html   (564 words)

ZUSE-FREDKIN-THESIS   (Site not responding. Last check: ) Recently Schmidhuber observed, "Even earlier, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (who not only co-invented calculus but also built the first mechanical multiplier in 1670) caused a stir by claiming that everything is computable". On the other hand, apparently Wolfram does not intend to imply that the universe is a classical cellular automaton--at least if you read the fine print. Then he goes on to say that "no literal mechanistic model can ever in the end realistically be expected to work." I take this to refer to classical cellular automata. www.math.usf.edu /~eclark/ANKOS_zuse_fredkin_thesis.html   (294 words)

MIND Exchange It's shocking to me that Fredkin and Toffoli were not mentioned at all by Wolfram's book, since their work in "digital physics" was ground-breaking. Fredkin definitely pioneered the idea of the Universe as one giant cellular automaton, and wrote extensively on the topic before I graduated MIT in 1992. Fredkin definitely touched on everything that Wolfram has touched on, from the synopses of the book I've read (I'm waiting to obtain my copy of the book), and he did it earlier, but all he gets credit for in Wolfram's book is the idea that space is discreet? www.kurzweilai.net /mindx/show_thread.php?rootID=6818&o=date   (7711 words)

Deep Blue team awarded | CNET News.com IBM's Deep Blue team received the $100,000 Fredkin Prize for Computer Chess today in recognition of their victory over world chess champion Garry Kasparov this May. The prize was awarded by Carnegie Mellon University, where it was established by computer science professor Edward Fredkin 17 years ago to encourage research in computer chess. The prize originally consisted of three separate awards: $5,000 for the first team to develop a machine achieving master status, $10,000 for the first group to create a machine of international master status, and $100,000 for the first team to develop a computer capable of beating the world chess champion. news.com.com /2100-1001_3-201922.html   (408 words)

DP FAQ Fredkin's thesis is the milestone of the whole DP theory; in DP we assume that assertion made by Fredkin is correct and we operate with it just like a computer scientists operate with so called "Church-Turing-Post thesis". The minimality (or Petrov) hypothesis states that if Fredkin thesis is a correct assumption, then there exists some relatively simple mathematical condition (predicate), which is 'true' for the CA which is supposed to be our Universe, and is 'false' for all other CAs. If Fredkin's thesis is correct, then Petrov's hypothesis might be incorrect only to some certain extent. www.digitalphysics.org /Faq   (2083 words)

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