In the beginning was the code

The universe seems incredibly complex. But could its rules be dead simple? Juergen Schmidhuber's fascinating story will convince you that this universe and your own life are just by-products of a very simple and fast program computing all logically possible universes.

This talk was given at .

About Juergen Schmidhuber (CH)

Juergen Schmidhuber is Director of the Swiss Artificial Intelligence Lab IDSIA (since 1995), Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Lugano, Switzerland (since 2009), and Professor SUPSI (since 2003). He helped to transform IDSIA into one of the world's top ten AI labs (the smallest!), according to the ranking of Business Week Magazine. His group pioneered the field of mathematically optimal universal AI and universal problem solvers. The algorithms developed in his lab won seven first prizes in international pattern recognition competitions, as well as several best paper awards.

Since 1990 he has developed a formal theory of fun and curiosity and creativity to build artificial scientists and artists. He also generalized the many-worlds theory of physics to a theory of all constructively computable universes - an algorithmic theory of everything.

He has published nearly 300 peer-reviewed scientific works on topics such as machine learning, artificial recurrent neural networks, fast deep neural nets, adaptive robotics, algorithmic information and complexity theory, digital physics, the formal theory of beauty & humor, and the fine arts. In 2008 he was elected member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.