{"id":23587,"date":"2016-03-16T03:47:25","date_gmt":"2016-03-16T10:47:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/03\/stephen-wolfram-could-there-be-alien-intelligence-among-the-digits-of-pi"},"modified":"2017-06-04T10:40:18","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T17:40:18","slug":"stephen-wolfram-could-there-be-alien-intelligence-among-the-digits-of-pi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/03\/stephen-wolfram-could-there-be-alien-intelligence-among-the-digits-of-pi","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Wolfram: Could There Be Alien Intelligence Among the Digits of Pi?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.embedly.com\/widgets\/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FhpMitddU174%3Ffeature%3Doembed&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DhpMitddU174&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FhpMitddU174%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=a0e34f678e9a44f4b746684241ddaf3f&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube\" width=\"854\" height=\"480\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Stephen Wolfram, the inventor of the mathematical programming system <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wolfram.com\/language\/\" target=\"_blank\">Wolfram Language<\/a>, thinks there might be intelligent life, of a sort, in the digits of pi. He spoke recently at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.seti.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">SETI Institute<\/a> about what his \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/mathworld.wolfram.com\/PrincipleofComputationalEquivalence.html\" target=\"_blank\">principle of computational equivalence<\/a>\u201d means for non-human intelligence \u2014 check out the heady hour-and-a-half lecture below.<\/p>\n<p>The key thread running through his concept is that simple rules underpin complex behavior. For Wolfram, the pigmentation patterns on a mollusk shell, for example, aren\u2019t necessarily the outcome of deliberate evolutionary forces. \u201cI think the mollusk is going out into the computational universe, finding a random program, and running it and printing it on its shell,\u201d Wolfram says in the lecture. \u201cIf I\u2019m right, the universe is just like an elaborate version of the digits of pi.\u201d (There is some debate, of course, over <a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/node\/1154164\" target=\"_blank\">just how right Wolfram<\/a> is \u2014 though you won\u2019t really get that from the lecture.) <\/p>\n<p>To show how this simplicity-begetting complexity relates to aliens, Wolfram draws from the end of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Contact_(novel\" target=\"_blank\">Carl Sagan\u2019s <em>Contact<\/em><\/a>). Spoilers (for a book): after communicating with the alien intelligence, astronomer Ellie Arroway finds in the digits of pi <a href=\"http:\/\/kasmana.people.cofc.edu\/MATHFICT\/mf55-spoiler.html\" target=\"_blank\">an image of a circle<\/a>. She takes it as a sign of intelligence baked into the universe. Because the digits are both random and infinite, this also means that within pi \u201ccombinatorially there exists the works of Shakespeare and any possible picture of any possible circle,\u201d Wolfram says.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.inverse.com\/article\/12838-stephen-wolfram-could-there-be-alien-intelligence-among-the-digits-of-pi?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=on_site&utm_campaign=desktop\">https:\/\/www.inverse.com\/article\/12838-stephen-wolfram-could-...gn=desktop<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Stephen Wolfram, the inventor of the mathematical programming system Wolfram Language, thinks there might be intelligent life, of a sort, in the digits of pi. He spoke recently at the SETI Institute about what his \u201cprinciple of computational equivalence\u201d means for non-human intelligence \u2014 check out the heady hour-and-a-half lecture below. The key thread running [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":387,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,2229],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-mathematics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/387"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23587"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62379,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23587\/revisions\/62379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}