Wolfram Physics Bulletin
Informal updates and commentary on progress in the Wolfram Physics Project
A Minimal Example of Multicomputation
Multicomputation is an important new paradigm, but one that can be quite difficult to understand. Here my goal is to discuss a minimal example: multiway systems based on numbers. Many general multicomputational phenomena will show up here in simple forms (though others will not). And the involvement of numbers will often allow us to make immediate use of traditional mathematical methods.
A multiway system can be described as taking each of its states and repeatedly replacing it according to some rule or rules with a collection of states, merging any states produced that are identical. In our Physics Project, the states are combinations of relations between elements, represented by hypergraphs. We’ve also often considered string substitution systems, in which the states are strings of characters. But here I’ll consider the case in which the states are numbers, and for now just single integers.