20051011

Life, the Universe and The Complexity Zoo IQC Waterloo In Shtetl-Optimized, Scott Aaronson waxes poetic on complexity theory: "Why is it so hard to explain that we don't worry about [complexity classes] because we're eccentric anal-retentives, but because we want to know whether a never-ending cavalcade of machines, each richer and more complicated than the last, might possibly succeed at a task on which any one machine must inevitably flounder – namely, the task of outracing time itself, of simulating cosmic history in an eyeblink, of seeing in the unformed clumps of an embryonic universe the swirl of every galaxy and flight of every hummingbird billions of years hence, like Almighty God Himself?"

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