Stephen Wolfram Q&A

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Some collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram

Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.

April 9, 2005

From: Interview by Andres Hax, Clarín

Is it correct to say that with your discoveries regarding the behavior of cellular automata, you are introducing a paradigm shift in the sciences on par with Darwin?

If there’s an analogy, it’s probably this. Darwin went on voyages around the world and saw all sorts of remarkable biological phenomena—that led him to a new paradigm. I’ve taken a lot of abstract voyages in the computational world, and have seen all sorts of remarkable phenomena there—that have led me to a new paradigm, that I think is going to be important for a lot of science and technology. And in fact, it also happens to have quite a bit to say about some of the foundational questions in biology that Darwin was interested in.

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