An elementary process in Zuse's Calculating Space: Two digital particles A and B form a new digital particle C.

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

Further reading

  • Zuse, Konrad (1969). Rechnender Raum [Calculating Space]. Schriften zur Datenverarbeitung (in German). Vol.1. Braunschweig, Germany: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn. ISBN3-528-09609-8. (70+4 pages)
  • Zuse, Konrad (February 1970). (PDF). MIT Technical Translation. Translated by Aztec School of Languages, Inc. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. AZT-70-164-GEMIT (Project MAC). Archived from (PDF) on 2017-07-06. (98 pages); Zuse, Konrad (2012). (PDF). In German, Adrian; Zenil, Hector (eds.). A Computable Universe: Understanding & Exploring Nature as Computation (re-edition in LaTeX with permission of MIT and Zuse's familyed.). World Scientific. (PDF) from the original on 2022-05-21. (69 pages)
  • Alex, Jürgen (2007). "Rechnender Raum". Zur Entstehung des Computers - Von Alfred Tarski zu Konrad Zuse [...] - Tertium non datur. Düsseldorf, Germany: VDI-Verlag. pp.251–279. ISBN978-3-18-150051-4. ISSN.

External links

  • Jürgen Schmidhuber's Zuse's book and 1967 paper.
  • - Konrad Zuse's visualization of the idea
  • Simulation of waves within a 2D space (time and space are discrete), similar to FDTD. An OpenCL graphic card is needed.