"Computers are famous for being able to do complicated things starting from simple programs"
About this Quote
There is a sly humility baked into Seth Lloyd's line: the magic isn’t in the machine’s “intelligence,” it’s in the gap between a few clean rules and the baroque behavior they can unleash. “Famous” is doing quiet work here. It nods to the popular aura around computers - sleek, opaque, almost alchemical - then undercuts it with the unromantic truth that much of computation is just rule-following at scale. The wonder comes from repetition, layering, and feedback, not from any secret spark.
The phrasing also smuggles in a worldview common to physicists of information: complexity is often emergent. Start with simplicity, iterate, and you can get weather systems, market crashes, ant colonies, and yes, the messy output of modern software. Lloyd’s intent isn’t to romanticize programming so much as to reframe what we should be impressed by. A computer’s “complicated things” are less a triumph of clever one-off tricks than a demonstration of how far formal systems can be pushed when you have speed, memory, and a willingness to let outcomes surprise you.
Context matters because Lloyd has spent a career arguing that information is physical and that computation isn’t confined to laptops; the universe itself can be read as a kind of computer. In that light, the quote doubles as an invitation: stop treating complexity as evidence of mysticism. Treat it as the predictable, sometimes dangerous, byproduct of simple rules run long enough.
The phrasing also smuggles in a worldview common to physicists of information: complexity is often emergent. Start with simplicity, iterate, and you can get weather systems, market crashes, ant colonies, and yes, the messy output of modern software. Lloyd’s intent isn’t to romanticize programming so much as to reframe what we should be impressed by. A computer’s “complicated things” are less a triumph of clever one-off tricks than a demonstration of how far formal systems can be pushed when you have speed, memory, and a willingness to let outcomes surprise you.
Context matters because Lloyd has spent a career arguing that information is physical and that computation isn’t confined to laptops; the universe itself can be read as a kind of computer. In that light, the quote doubles as an invitation: stop treating complexity as evidence of mysticism. Treat it as the predictable, sometimes dangerous, byproduct of simple rules run long enough.
Quote Details
| Topic | Coding & Programming |
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