Matthew Cook

Last updated

Matthew Cook (born February 7, 1970) is a mathematician and computer scientist who is best known for having proved Stephen Wolfram's conjecture that the Rule 110 cellular automaton is Turing-complete.

Contents

Biography

Cook was born in Morgantown, West Virginia and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois and the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program. In 1987, Cook qualified as a member of the six-person US team to the International Mathematical Olympiad and won a bronze medal. In 1990, Cook went to work for Wolfram Research, makers of the computer algebra system Mathematica. He did his doctoral work in Computation and Neural Systems at Caltech from 1999 to 2005. He is now at the Institute of Neuroinformatics at Zurich in Switzerland.

Work with Stephen Wolfram

In the 1990s Cook worked as a research assistant to Stephen Wolfram, assisting with work on Wolfram's book, A New Kind of Science . Among other things, he developed a proof showing that the Rule 110 cellular automaton is Turing-complete.

Cook presented his proof at the Santa Fe Institute conference CA98 before the publishing of Wolfram's bookan action that led Wolfram Research to accuse Cook of violating his NDA and resulted in the blocking of the publication of the proof in the conference proceedings. [1]

A New Kind of Science was released in 2002 with an outline of the proof. In 2004, Cook published his proof in Wolfram's journal Complex Systems . [2]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Turing machine</span> Computation model defining an abstract machine

A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation describing an abstract machine that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite the model's simplicity, it is capable of implementing any computer algorithm.

In computability theory, a system of data-manipulation rules is said to be Turing-complete or computationally universal if it can be used to simulate any Turing machine. This means that this system is able to recognize or decode other data-manipulation rule sets. Turing completeness is used as a way to express the power of such a data-manipulation rule set. Virtually all programming languages today are Turing-complete.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Conway's Game of Life</span> Two-dimensional cellular automaton

The Game of Life, also known as Conway's Game of Life or simply Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves. It is Turing complete and can simulate a universal constructor or any other Turing machine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Cook</span> American-Canadian computer scientist, contributor to complexity theory

Stephen Arthur Cook is an American-Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who has made significant contributions to the fields of complexity theory and proof complexity. He is a university professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science and Department of Mathematics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Wolfram</span> British-American scientist (born 1959)

Stephen Wolfram is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer algebra, and theoretical physics. In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cellular automaton</span> Discrete model studied in computer science

A cellular automaton is a discrete model of computation studied in automata theory. Cellular automata are also called cellular spaces, tessellation automata, homogeneous structures, cellular structures, tessellation structures, and iterative arrays. Cellular automata have found application in various areas, including physics, theoretical biology and microstructure modeling.

In computer science, a universal Turing machine (UTM) is a Turing machine capable of computing any computable sequence, as described by Alan Turing in his seminal paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem". Common sense might say that a universal machine is impossible, but Turing proves that it is possible. He suggested that we may compare a human in the process of computing a real number to a machine which is only capable of a finite number of conditions ; which will be called "m-configurations". He then described the operation of such machine, as described below, and argued:

It is my contention that these operations include all those which are used in the computation of a number.

<i>A New Kind of Science</i> Book by Stephen Wolfram

A New Kind of Science is a book by Stephen Wolfram, published by his company Wolfram Research under the imprint Wolfram Media in 2002. It contains an empirical and systematic study of computational systems such as cellular automata. Wolfram calls these systems simple programs and argues that the scientific philosophy and methods appropriate for the study of simple programs are relevant to other fields of science.

The Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics (HCSSiM) is an American residential program for mathematically talented high school students. The program has been conducted each summer since 1971, with the exceptions of 1981 and 1996, and has more than 1500 alumni. Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 Summer Studies ran online for a shortened program of four weeks.

In the theory of computation, a tag system is a deterministic model of computation published by Emil Leon Post in 1943 as a simple form of a Post canonical system. A tag system may also be viewed as an abstract machine, called a Post tag machine —briefly, a finite-state machine whose only tape is a FIFO queue of unbounded length, such that in each transition the machine reads the symbol at the head of the queue, deletes a constant number of symbols from the head, and appends to the tail a symbol-string that depends solely on the first symbol read in this transition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rule 110</span> Elementary cellular automaton

The Rule 110 cellular automaton is an elementary cellular automaton with interesting behavior on the boundary between stability and chaos. In this respect, it is similar to Conway's Game of Life. Like Life, Rule 110 with a particular repeating background pattern is known to be Turing complete. This implies that, in principle, any calculation or computer program can be simulated using this automaton.

A cellular automaton (CA) is Life-like if it meets the following criteria:

Humans have considered and tried to create non-biological life for at least 3,000 years. As seen in tales ranging from Pygmalion to Frankenstein, humanity has long been intrigued by the concept of artificial life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Von Neumann universal constructor</span> Self-replicating cellular automaton

John von Neumann's universal constructor is a self-replicating machine in a cellular automaton (CA) environment. It was designed in the 1940s, without the use of a computer. The fundamental details of the machine were published in von Neumann's book Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, completed in 1966 by Arthur W. Burks after von Neumann's death. It is regarded as foundational for automata theory, complex systems, and artificial life. Indeed, Nobel Laureate Sydney Brenner considered Von Neumann's work on self-reproducing automata central to biological theory as well, allowing us to "discipline our thoughts about machines, both natural and artificial."

In his book A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram described a universal 2-state 5-symbol Turing machine, and conjectured that a particular 2-state 3-symbol Turing machine might be universal as well.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rule 90</span> Elementary cellular automaton

In the mathematical study of cellular automata, Rule 90 is an elementary cellular automaton based on the exclusive or function. It consists of a one-dimensional array of cells, each of which can hold either a 0 or a 1 value. In each time step all values are simultaneously replaced by the XOR of their two neighboring values. Martin, Odlyzko & Wolfram (1984) call it "the simplest non-trivial cellular automaton", and it is described extensively in Stephen Wolfram's 2002 book A New Kind of Science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elementary cellular automaton</span> Mathematics concept

In mathematics and computability theory, an elementary cellular automaton is a one-dimensional cellular automaton where there are two possible states and the rule to determine the state of a cell in the next generation depends only on the current state of the cell and its two immediate neighbors. There is an elementary cellular automaton which is capable of universal computation, and as such it is one of the simplest possible models of computation.

Norman H. Margolus is a Canadian-American physicist and computer scientist, known for his work on cellular automata and reversible computing. He is a research affiliate with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reversible cellular automaton</span> Cellular automaton that can be run backwards

A reversible cellular automaton is a cellular automaton in which every configuration has a unique predecessor. That is, it is a regular grid of cells, each containing a state drawn from a finite set of states, with a rule for updating all cells simultaneously based on the states of their neighbors, such that the previous state of any cell before an update can be determined uniquely from the updated states of all the cells. The time-reversed dynamics of a reversible cellular automaton can always be described by another cellular automaton rule, possibly on a much larger neighborhood.

References

  1. Martinez, Genaro J.; Seck Tuoh Mora, Juan; Chapa, Sergio; Lemaitre, Christian (April 2019). "Brief notes and history computing in Mexico during 50 years". International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems. 35 (2): 185–192. arXiv: 1905.07527 . doi:10.1080/17445760.2019.1608990. S2CID   150262966 . Retrieved 2020-04-15.
  2. Cook, Matthew (2004). "Universality in Elementary Cellular Automata". Complex Systems. 15: 1–40. doi:10.25088/ComplexSystems.15.1.1. Archived (PDF) from the original on 28 May 2016.