Jürgen Schmidhuber
Computer scientist: our universe may be computed by a very short program, which also computes every other possible universe.
Life
German computer scientist born in 1963 in Munich, a specialist in artificial intelligence. He is best known for "LSTM" neural networks, published in 1997 with Sepp Hochreiter and later widely used for language processing. He directs research at the IDSIA institute in Switzerland and at KAUST university in Saudi Arabia. On the big questions, he defends the idea that our universe is computed by a program, probably a short one.
Main works
With Sepp Hochreiter: a neural network able to keep information over long sequences of data.
Running all computable universes takes less information than computing just one.
Theories in which the universe is computed are the simplest ones compatible with everything we know.
In his own words
« From an esthetical point of view that favors simple explanations of everything, a set-up in which all possible universes are computed instead of just ours is more attractive. It is simpler. »
« One may believe in the validity of algorithmic TOEs until (a) there is evidence against them, e.g., someone shows that our own universe is not formally describable and would not be possible without, say, existence of incomputable numbers »