In my own work leading up to A New Kind of Science, I started by studying the natural world, yet found myself increasingly being led to generalize beyond traditional mathematical constructs. But I did not wind up with logic. Instead, I began to consider all possible kinds of rules—or as I have tended to describe it (making use of modern experience), the computational universe of all possible programs. Some of these programs describe parts of the natural world. Some give us interesting fodder for technology. And some correspond to traditional formal systems like logic and mathematics. One thing
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