Bio

Bernard Francois is a freelance translator for the NKS book in French (in progress). Before his contact with Wolfram Research, he published two papers on NKS last year with the help of French scientific magazine Automates Intelligents on intrinsic randomness and the limits of mathematics.

Bernard regularly performs contract work as a life support supervisor for diving companies using saturation chambers, mostly in West Africa. He also occasionally takes up contracts at the Hyperbaric Research Center of Comex in Marseille (France), where he lives.

He has degrees in biochemistry, physiology, genetics, and epistemology. He is interested in wide-ranging fields including sociology, ecology, literature, philosophy, art, journalism, mountain-biking, trekking, rafting, and hiking in canyons.

“I am becoming more and more convinced that we are in a paradigm-shift period, and that NKS is one of the most advanced positions to observe this and to practice the building of new exhaustive tools allowing us to explore the huge space of irreducible systems, beyond classic iterative approaches, and to find unexpected results in any area.”

Project: About Coarse Graining by Elimination of Relevant Degrees of Freedom

A different way to coarse-grain elementary cellular automata, based on application of the renormalisation procedure and developed by Goldenfeld and Israeli, finish, independently from authors, to be presented as saving us all from the grip of unpredictability–from the “infamous” rule 110. I want to analyse the original paper and propose more realistic consequences.

Results of the conducted analyses and experiments have shown why the CA emulation map of Goldenfeld and the CA emulation map of Wolfram are different. The work carried out has demonstrated that the difference is not fundamental and the magnification of this difference seems to come not from scientific reason. This seems to be a sign that NKS starts to diffuse out of the strict scientific field, and mobilize other fields of knowledge to answer it.

Favorite Four-Color, Nearest-Neighbor, Totalistic Rule

Rule chosen: 477590

I chose this one because it looks very organised–all the little pieces are in the right place–and at the same time very chaotic and unpredictable. It symbolizes for me the compatibility between determinism and unpredictability.