Konrad Zuse, a painter and inventor of the first program-driven computer, saw in his invention parallels with the world around him. In his book, Rechnender Raum (translated as Calculating Space) he posed a radical notion: that the universe operates based on a set of basic on/off instructions similar to that of cellular automata. Fellow computer scientists Edward Fredkin and Jürgen Schmidhuber reminisce about Zuse, his work, and the ideas that kick-started serious thought in the realm of digital physics.

More from this series: Rebooting the Cosmos

Recorded June 2011; Posted September 2011