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The Universe in 4 Lines of Code?

Posted by michael on from the where-the-sidewalk-ends dept.

serendigital writes "Stephen Wolfram, founder of Wolfram Research and creator of Mathematica has, after 10 years+ finished his book, "A New Kind of Science." In a "Wired" article entitled: The Man Who Cracked The Code to Everything ...," Steven Levy talks about how and why the book was written and more importantly, what it is about. The best part of the article is in this exchange: 'I've got to ask you,' I say. 'How long do you envision this rule of the universe to be?' ... 'I don't know. In Mathematica, for example, perhaps three, four lines of code.'" This book seems a little... nutty. But it's been submitted a bunch of times. If anyone wants to review it, go right ahead.

6 of 467 comments (clear)

  1. Silly mathematicians. by zzendpad · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is silly. The universe is far too simple to be explained by mathematics.

  2. 4 Lines? Bleh... by number+one+duck · · Score: 5, Funny

    A *real* god would do it in but a single line of Perl.

  3. related by bilbobuggins · · Score: 5, Funny

    In related news,
    Bill Gates concurred while noting that those four lines of course referenced msie.dll to get the job done.

  4. I can do it in one. by dstone · · Score: 5, Funny

    Four lines?! I don't know where this Wolfram guy was trained, but I can declare the constant 42 in a single line. Well, I suppose that does leave 3 lines for comments. And if anything was worth commenting...

  5. Bug by DeadBugs · · Score: 5, Funny

    "The Universe in 4 Lines of Code?"

    Do you ever get the feeling there is a bug in one of those lines?

    --
    http://www.kubuntu.org/
  6. Re:4 Lines? Bleh... by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Funny
    A *real* god would do it in but a single line of Perl.

    That explains why the world is so F'd up: he couldn't read it six months later to debug it
    :-p

    --
    Table-ized A.I.