Edward Fredkin was an early pioneer of digital physics (in recent work he uses the term digital philosophy (DP)). His main contributions include his work on reversible computing and cellular automata. While Konrad Zuse's book Calculating Space (1969) mentioned the importance of reversible computation, the Fredkin Gate represented the essential breakthrough. In theoretical physics, digital physics holds the basic premise that the entire history of our universe is computable, that is, the output of a (presumably short) computer program. ... Digital philosophy is a new movement in philosophy advocated by prominent scientists such as Edward Fredkin, Stephen Wolfram, and Gregory Chaitin. ... This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. ... Konrad Zuse (June 22, 1910 - December 18, 1995) was a German engineer and computer pioneer. ... Calculating Space is the title of MIT´s English Translation of Konrad Zuse´s book Rechnender Raum (published in Germany in 1969), the first book on digital physics. ... The Fredkin Gate is computational circuit suitable for reversible computing, invented by Ed Fredkin. ...

Edward Fredkin dropped out of Caltech after one year and, at age 19, joined the USAF and became a jet fighter pilot. Fredkin’s computer career started in 1956 when the Air Force assigned him to work at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He worked at BBN in the early 1960s where he wrote the PDP-1 assembler. In 1968 Fredkin returned to academia, starting at MIT as a full professor. From 1971 to 1974 he was Director of Project MAC. He spent a year at Caltech as a Fairchild Distinguished Scholar, working with Richard Feynman, and was a Professor of Physics at Boston University for 6 years. More recently he has been a Distinguished Career Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and also a Visiting Professor at MIT. MIT Lincoln Laboratory, also known as Lincoln Lab, is a federally funded research and development center managed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and funded by the United States Department of Defense. ... Bolt, Beranek and Newman (now called BBN Technologies) is a technology company that provides research and development services. ... The PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1) was the first computer in Digital Equipments PDP series and was first produced in 1960. ... MIT redirects here. ... Project MAC, later the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS), was a research laboratory at MIT. Project MAC would become famous for groundbreaking research in operating systems, artificial intelligence, and the theory of computation. ... California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (commonly known as Caltech) is a private, coeducational university located in Pasadena, California, in the United States. ... Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918–February 15, 1988) (surname pronounced FINE-man; in IPA) was one of the most influential American physicists of the 20th century, expanding greatly the theory of quantum electrodynamics. ... Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. ...

Fredkin founded Information International Inc. and has served as the CEO of a diverse set of companies, including Information International Inc., Three Rivers Computer Corporation, New England Television Corporation (owner of Boston's then CBS affiliate, WNEV, channel 7) and others. His academic career includes a period as Director of the MIT's Project MAC (1971-1974), and professorships at MIT, Boston University and Carnegie Mellon University. Boston is the capital of and the largest city in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. ... CBSs first color logo, which debuted in the fall of 1965. ... The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a research institution and university located in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts directly across the Charles River from Bostons Back Bay district. ... Project MAC, later the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS), was a research laboratory at MIT. Project MAC would become famous for groundbreaking research in operating systems, artificial intelligence, and the theory of computation. ... Boston University is a non-sectarian private university located in Boston, Massachusetts. ... Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. ...

Fredkin has been broadly interested in computation: hardware and software. He is the inventor of many things including the trie data structure, the Fredkin Gate and the Billiard Ball Model for reversible computing. He has also been involved in computer vision, chess and other areas of Artificial Intelligence research. Fredkin also works at the intersection of theoretical issues in the physics of computation and computational models of physics. He recently developed Salt, a model of computation based on fundamental conservation laws from physics. A trie for keys to, tea, ten, inn. In computer science, a trie is an ordered tree data structure that is used to store an associative array where the keys are strings. ... The Fredkin Gate is computational circuit suitable for reversible computing, invented by Ed Fredkin. ... This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. ... Artificial intelligence (also known as machine intelligence and often abbreviated as AI) is intelligence exhibited by any manufactured (i. ...

External links

• Digital Philosophy (http://www.digitalphilosophy.org/)