Is Life a Form of Computation?
Alan Turing and John von Neumann saw it early: the logic of life and the logic of code may be one and the same. Image source: Miguel Romero, Adobe Stock Originally published in thereader.mitpress.mit.edu by Blaise Agüera y Arcas Image source: Miguel Romero, Adobe Stock I n 1994, a strange, pixelated machine came to life on a computer screen . I t read a string of instructions, copied them, and built a clone of itself — just as the Hungarian-American Polymath John von Neumann had predicted half a century earlier . It was a striking demonstration of a profound idea: that life, at its core, might be computational. This article is adapted from Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s book “ What Is Intelligence? ” An open access edition of the book is available here . Although this is seldom fully appreciated, von Neumann was one of the first to establish a deep link between life and computation . Reproduction, like computation, he showed, could be carried out by machines following ...