About This Video

Computer scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber proposes that the information content of anything you can see, touch, and think about in the physical world—from the billions of synapses in your brain to the apparent richness of reality—can be defined by a very short program, or “a few lines of code.” Similar to how fractal geometry emerges from a simple mathematical equation, or how one strand of DNA contains all the instructions needed to build a living organism, Schmidhuber posits that complexity and seeming randomness in the universe may emerge from a relatively short set of instructions.
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Image courtesy of Howard Walfish; Recorded June 2011; Posted September 2011