Physicist Stephen Wolfram believes the universe is composed of simple programs, rather than of particles and waves, as standard scientific theory holds. Wolfram, a guest speaker at Comdex on Wednesday, presented his "techno centric" theory that these countless programs, or algorithms, make up phenomena as fundamental as space and as complex as human beings.

Wolfram's speech covered abstractions such as the curvature of space and the impossibility of simplifying some computing problems and presented a dramatically different subject matter and way of looking at matter. Wolfram challenged the audience to look farther into the future than their life span for an understanding of the universe. "What feeds the pipeline of technology is science," Wolfram said. "There's a broader range of (computing) things, and they don't all have to be based on CMOS and gates [the technology that is the foundation of today's microprocessors]. Systems out there in nature are already doing computations as complex as the ones that correspond to human intelligence."

Wolfram's ideas emerged as he was trying to solve mysteries such as why asymmetry and structure should emerge in the universe. He believes he now has an explanation: simple rules and algorithms can produce unpredictable chaos. "Out there in the computational world, even extremely simple rules can produce complicated behavior," he said. And it does appear that some schools of thought support his theory. According to Wolfram, economists are relying on research that is algorithm based; understanding of the rules and algorithms that are part of the growth of biological matter, such as cells and tissue, will lead to medical breakthroughs that are barely comprehendible now. "One day, perhaps quite soon, we're really going to know the final fundamental rules of the universe. I think the rules will turn out to be quite simple. Determining how the universe is created from those rules turns out to be hard, hard work," said Wolfram. "What I think is going to be possible is to have computational models of biological cells in which all the possible processes going on will be represented by little programs."