Bio

Maksim Piskunov is a physics Ph.D. student at Northeastern University. He is also into software development, and he did an internship at Lyft last summer, where he worked on autonomous vehicles. He is especially interested in fundamental physics, in particular, discrete models of spacetime such as network substitution systems described in Chapter 9 of A New Kind of Science. He studied these systems in 2014 and 2015 at the Wolfram Summer School. He is now developing a Wolfram Language package to efficiently evolve such systems, and he hopes to use it to eventually find the fundamental theory of physics.

Computational Essay: The Simplest Set Replace Rules

Project: Confluent Set Substitution Systems

Goal

Understand how quantum physics might work in set (network) substitution systems.

Summary of Results

• Set (network) substitution system simulator, including causal networks.
• Behavior of systems with critical pair completions.
• Universality of non-overlapping set substitution systems.
• Enumeration up to size 14.

Future Work

• Optimize and test SetReplace code.
• Simulate quantum effects with critical pair completions.
• Find the simplest complex non-overlapping rule.