PhilosophersEdward Fredkin
Edward Fredkin
Computer scientist: advocate of "digital physics", the idea that the universe is fundamentally made of computation.
1934 · 2023 United StatesLos Angeles (United States)
Life
American computer scientist and physicist (1934-2023), a professor at MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Boston University. He worked on reversible computing, which loses no information (the "Fredkin gate"), and on cellular automata. He defended "digital philosophy": at the deepest level, nature would be a computation on finite information.
Main works
1982
Conservative Logic
With Tommaso Toffoli: a computation can be done without losing information, reversibly.
1990
Digital Mechanics
Describing physics with reversible cellular automata.
2003
An Introduction to Digital Philosophy
Physical reality would at bottom be a discrete computation.