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.

July 24, 2019

From: Interview by Will Carey, Creative Chair

If you died and got reincarnated as a song, what would that song be?

Hmmm. I’m guessing my brain has 100 trillion or so synaptic weights, that encode my memories, etc. And I suppose you could transmit those, even as music, though at least for now they’d be pretty hard to reconstruct as “me”. My scientific work, particularly around my Principle of Computational Equivalence, has led me to believe that a wide range of things, including human brains, are computationally
equivalent, even to programs with simple rules. So perhaps I could just as well be represented by the sequence from my favorite rule 30 cellular automaton, as rendered, for example, on our WolframTones website.

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