computational irreducibility

A long Lex Fridman interview with Stephen Wolfram on complexity, cellular automata, computational irreducibility and the Wolfram Physics Project.

Joscha Bach's 32C3 talk applies computational theories of mind to questions of meaning, emotion, and love, asking how computation can explain irrational-seeming human experience.

A Disney Research SIGGRAPH 2013 demo of an interactive system that lets non-experts design animated mechanical characters. The user sketches motion curves and the system generates optimized mechanisms and gear trains for 3D printing.

An 11-minute animated introduction to P vs. NP and the wider landscape of complexity classes, inspired by the Complexity Zoo wiki. It assumes no background in computer science.

The first lecture in an 18-part series on digital photography from Marc Levoy's Stanford CS 178 course, recorded at Google in 2016. The series covers how digital cameras work and computational photography, with slides and assignments available on the course site.

Joscha Bach's 31c3 talk argues that the mind should be understood as an information-processing system and that even the physical universe can be seen as computational. It tours the philosophy underlying artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

Joscha Bach's 35C3 talk offers an AI perspective on the soul, covering perception, mental representation, agency, consciousness and selfhood as things that can arise in a computational system like the brain.

The SIGGRAPH 2005 demo of dual photography from Stanford, which swaps the roles of projector and camera to render a scene from the light's point of view. It includes the reveal of a hidden playing card.

Tom Murphy's satirical SIGBOVIK 2007 presentation, delivered under a pseudonym, proving that generalized Super Mario Bros. is NP-complete. It is a short, deadpan take on a complexity theory result.

Christian Schafmeister's Google Tech Talk on Clasp and CANDO, a Common Lisp implementation on LLVM and C++ used to design molecules, including energy minimization and force-field calculations.

A roughly four-and-a-half-hour Lex Fridman podcast conversation with Stephen Wolfram about his Wolfram Physics Project and a fundamental theory of physics, computation, life and the universe.

Christian Schafmeister presents CANDO at the 2016 European Lisp Symposium. It is a compiled Lisp-based language for designing macromolecules and nanoscale materials, built on the Clasp implementation of Common Lisp.

Ramesh Raskar presents femto-photography, a technique that captures a trillion frames per second, fast enough to show light itself moving through a scene. He discusses possible uses such as cameras that see around corners or inside the body.

Guy Steele presents a small geometric problem and compares four computational approaches: a classic sequential solution and three parallel-friendly ones. Each is illustrated pictorially and with working code, weighing total work against time to solution.

Matt Might's Curry On talk on ending errors in code, both software and the human genome. He covers conservative approximation of the halting problem via static analysis and a computational approach to precision medicine.

Tom Scott-style exploration by suckerpinch (Tom7) of generalized anagrams where letters can be broken into pieces, called anagraphs, with a whimsical computational approach.

Andrew Sorensen's OSCON 2014 keynote in which he live-codes generative music on stage using his Impromptu environment while narrating his computational and musical choices. It imagines concert programmers as a performing art.

AlphaPhoenix uses Monte Carlo simulation and annealing-style methods to draw North Carolina congressional district maps, both gerrymandered and fair. He focuses on the fascinating computational problem rather than the politics.

A family video in which kids write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a parent follows them exactly as written, with comic results. It demonstrates how precise instructions must be.

Isaac Arthur explains the Matrioshka Brain, a hypothetical computer or artificial mind powered by an entire star using nested shells. It covers how such megastructures relate to Dyson spheres and superintelligence.

A SIGGRAPH demo from Yoichi Ochiai's group of aerial and volumetric graphics drawn by focused femtosecond lasers with computational holography. The plasma points can be touched.