Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

Wolfram Summer School

Alumni

Aleksandr Polovian

Summer School

Class of 2014

Bio

Aleksandr is a professional software developer currently working in the financial sector. He has an engineering degree in information systems from the National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics in St. Petersburg, Russia. Besides financial markets, he is interested in biology, physics, and computer science. More precisely he’s interested in questions of self-organizing systems, data modeling, and representation. At his very first glance at cellular automata models, he was impressed by the beautiful mix of order and chaos that emerges from simple models.

In his free time he is riding his bicycle around Copenhagen, learning to speak Danish, and trying to study.

Project: Kolmogorov Complexity of CA

Going back in time to save bits in the future

Given a state of a CA, find the minimal information needed to describe it.

Let’s say we have some state of the CA. Without any information on rule r that was used to obtain this state, initial conditions i and number of steps s, we can provide a set of possible versions of the past of this state. My goal in this project is to provide an optimal algorithm for finding a set {r, i, s} that can describe s given state with a minimal amount of information required.

Favorite Outer Totalistic r=1, k=2 2D Cellular Automaton

Rule 198188