Rudy Rucker
Rudy Rucker
Rudolf von Bitter Ruckeris an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of whichboth won Philip K. Dick Awards. Until its closure in 2014 he edited the science fiction webzine Flurb...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth22 March 1946
CountryUnited States of America
nice rude fiction
One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.
character work-out rude
Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.
teaching book rude
In any case, A New Kind of Science is a wonderful book, and I'm still absorbing its teachings.
books far might people rarely
People rarely write books that are that far out, so it might be interesting to try to write one, but no one will want to read it.
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At San Jose State I got very interested in the work of Stephen Wolfram, who wrote a pretty famous book called A New Kind of Science.
laws might parallel particle physical recipe region
Physical laws provide, at best, a recipe for how the world might be computed in parallel particle by particle and region by region.
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Gnarly processes often display patterns at several scales. We find them fun to watch because they tend to appear as if they're alive.
long littles world
A little-known truth: Every aspect of the world is fundamentally unpredictable. Computer scientists have long since proved this.
play ideas fiction
Some ideas you have to chew on, then roll them around a lot, play with them before you can turn them into funky science fiction.
ice-cream drawing space
What is the shape of space? Is it flat, or is it bent? Is it nicely laid out, or is it warped and shrunken? Is it finite, or is it infinite? Which of the following does space resemble more: (a) a sheet of paper, (b) an endless desert, (c) a soap bubble, (d) a doughnut, (e) an Escher drawing, (f) an ice cream cone, (g) the branches of a tree, or (h) a human body?
computation convince
Lately Ive been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.
garden thinking smartphones
When I see an old movie, like from the ’40s or ’50s or ’60s, the people look so calm. They don’t have smartphones, they’re not looking at computer screens, they’re taking their time. They’ll sit in a chair and just stare off into space. I think some day we’ll find our way back to that garden of Eden.
kind computer study
If we suppose that many natural phenomena are in effect computations, the study of computer science can tell us about the kinds of natural phenomena that can occur.
stupid spring thinking
Think of a field of daisies: they bloom, they wither, and in the spring they grow again. Who wants to see the same stupid daisy year after year, especially with a bunch of crappy iron-lung-type equipment bolted to it?