Edward Fredkin
| Edward Fredkin | |
| Born | October 2, 1934 |
|---|---|
| Died | June 13, 2023 |
| Residence | Unknown |
| Nationality | American |
| Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University, Carnegie Mellon University |
| Alma mater | California Institute of Technology |
Edward Fredkin (October 2, 1934 – June 13, 2023) was a computer scientist and early pioneer of digital physics, a school of philosophy which claims that all the physical processes of nature are forms of computation or information processing at the most fundamental level of reality. His interest in cellular automata contributed to his formulation of the "Finite Nature" hypothesis, that our universe is a computer automaton which, at each time step, digitally and locally processes its state for the next time step, and evolves deterministically from its initial condition.
Fredkin also invented the SALT CA,[1] a self-reproducing cellular automaton (1971),[2] and a technique for transforming any cellular automaton into a reversible one.[3] With Tommaso Toffoli, he invented the billiard-ball computer, a theoretical model of a reversible computer, which in turn can be simulated by reversible cellular automata.[4]
References
- ↑ "A New Computational Universe - Fredkin's SALT CA".
- ↑ "Self-reproducing cellular automata".
- ↑ Reversible cellular automaton at Wikipedia
- ↑ Billiard-ball computer at Wikipedia
Further reading
- Fredkin, 1993, "A New Cosmogony" in PhysComp '92: Proceedings of the Workshop on Physics and Computation, IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 116–121
- Edward Fredkin at Wikipedia
- Computer History Museum: Edward Fredkin
- DBPedia: Edward Fredkin
- Edward Fredkin at the Mathematics Genealogy Project