Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica and king-hell booster for cellular automata as a way of solving problems (and even creating space-time), has posted a fascinating rumination on what a bridge might look like if it were designed through evolutionary computing.
So what should the bridges of the future look like? Probably a lot less regular than today. Because I suspect the most robust structures will end up being ones with quite a lot of apparent randomness…
So we're going to end up being exposed to something really quite new. Something that exists in the abstract computational universe, but that we're "mining" for the very first time to create structures we want.
(Thanks, Kathryn!)
See also: Minneapolis bridge collapse: blog roundup
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