The grand problems of the cosmos (the origins thereof, the relationship of time and space) and the less grand problems of culture (box office returns, intelligent web searching, natural language processing) are irreducible but also calculable: they are not complicated problems with simple answers but rather simple problems (or rule-sets) that generate complicated answers. These assumptions open the door to a mathesis universalis, a language of science that the philosophers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, René Descartes, and others presaged as a way to achieve perfect understanding of the natural
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