Rudy Rucker

Talk Description

We're presently in the midst of a new intellectual revolution: we're coming to realize that physics, biology, minds and societies all emerge from interacting laws that can be regarded as computations. Everything is a gnarly computation ('gnarly' meaning richly complex, or what Stephen Wolfram calls class-four). A tree's growth, changes in weather, the flow of daily news, a person's ever-changing moods — all of these are gnarly computations. Although law-like and deterministic, gnarly computations are inherently unpredictable, per the 'Principle of Unpredictability,' which states that the behaviors of naturally occurring complex processes are formally impossible to predict by any conceivable means. This opens new ways of thinking about biological evolution, artistic creation, and human history.

Biography

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician and a computer scientist — in that order. A noted cyberpunk/transrealist author, Rucker moved to Silicon Valley when he turned 40. With degrees in mathematics from Swarthmore and Rutgers University, he recently retired from his Computer Science professorship at San Jose State University, where he developed a course on game programming and design. He has published twenty-nine books, primarily science fiction and popular science, and is best known for his novels Software and Wetware (both won Philip K. Dick Awards), as well as The Hacker and the Ants. His most recent books are a science fiction novel, Mathematicians in Love (Tor, 2006), an anthology of stories, Mad Professor (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2007), and a non-fiction book on the meaning of computation, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul (Thunder's Mouth, 2005). Rucker was at the time writing a novel involving a computational singularity.