Rudy Rucker

1946– · American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author and philosoph

Topics: complexity, mathematics, life

• So what is reality, one more time? An incompressible computation by a fractal CA of inconceivable dimensions. And where is this huge computation taking place? Everywhere; it’s what we’re made of.

  — Rudy Rucker

• The patterns of mathematics can be roughly grouped into five archetypes: Number, Space, Logic, Infinity, and Information.

  — Rudy Rucker

• So, okay, I’ll go for the universal-automatist answer to “What is reality?” Reality is made of gnarly computations.

  — Rudy Rucker

• What is reality? Take all your perceptions and all of mine, take everyone’s thoughts and all the visions. In an infinite-dimensional space there is room to fit them all together; each is a piece of the infinite-dimensional One, and this One is reality.

  — Rudy Rucker

• People sometimes say, “If the world really has a simple explanation, then where did all the randomness and information come from?” We can think of the information as coming in with the passage of time. Each tick of time increases the depth of the world computer’s output.

  — Rudy Rucker

• My purpose in writing Mind Tools has been to see what follows if one believes that everything is information. I have reached the following (debatable) conclusions.

  — Rudy Rucker

• It was good to be outside, away from the TV and the computer. The natural world had such high bandwidth.

  — Rudy Rucker

• It would take a supercomputer to simulate this puddle in real time—maybe even all the computers in the world. Especially if you included the air currents pushing the raindrops this way and that. Computable or not, it kept happening.

  — Rudy Rucker