Calculating Space Explained

Calculating Space (German: Rechnender Raum) is Konrad Zuse's 1969 book on automata theory. He proposed that all processes in the universe are computational. This view is known today as the simulation hypothesis, digital philosophy, digital physics or pancomputationalism. Zuse proposed that the universe is being computed by some sort of cellular automaton or other discrete computing machinery, challenging the long-held view that some physical laws are continuous by nature. He focused on cellular automata as a possible substrate of the computation, and pointed out that the classical notions of entropy and its growth do not make sense in deterministically computed universes.

See also

• A New Kind of Science
• Simulated reality

Further reading

• Book: Zuse . Konrad . Konrad Zuse . 1969 . Rechnender Raum . de . Calculating Space . Braunschweig, Germany . . Schriften zur Datenverarbeitung . 1 . 3-528-09609-8. (70+4 pages)
• Web site: [ftp://ftp.idsia.ch/pub/juergen/zuserechnenderraum.pdf Calculating Space - Translation of: Rechnender Raum ]. MIT Technical Translation . AZT-70-164-GEMIT (Project MAC) . Zuse . Konrad . Konrad Zuse . Aztec School of Languages, Inc. . Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA . February 1970 . . 2020-03-25 . live . https://web.archive.org/web/20200325103231/ftp://ftp.idsia.ch/pub/juergen/zuserechnenderraum.pdf . 2020-03-25. (98 pages); Book: Konrad Zuse's Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space) . en . A Computable Universe: Understanding & Exploring Nature as Computation . . Zuse . Konrad . Konrad Zuse . Adrian . German . Hector . Zenil . re-edition in LaTeX with permission of MIT and Zuse's family . 2012 . http://www.mathrix.org/zenil/ZuseCalculatingSpace-GermanZenil.pdf . 2022-08-02 . live . https://web.archive.org/web/20220521084904/http://www.mathrix.org/zenil/ZuseCalculatingSpace-GermanZenil.pdf . 2022-05-21. (69 pages)
• Book: Jürgen . Alex . Rechnender Raum . Zur Entstehung des Computers - Von Alfred Tarski zu Konrad Zuse [...] - Tertium non datur . . Düsseldorf, Germany . 2007 . 251–279 . 978-3-18-150051-4 . 0082-2361.

External links

• Jürgen Schmidhuber's site Zuse's book and 1967 paper.
• Calculating Space - a painting by Zuse - Konrad Zuse's visualization of the idea
• Web article and simulation of such a calculating space in C and LIBPNG
• SecondSpace Simulation of waves within a 2D space (time and space are discrete), similar to FDTD. An OpenCL graphic card is needed.