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What did you dream of doing when you were 16 years old? I wanted to drive a car and travel the world. But American mathematician Ray Solomonoff had more ambitious goals at that age. He wanted to find a method to solve every conceivable scientific problem.
This was not just wishful thinking—the teenager had a groundbreaking idea that would establish a completely new field of research. Over the next few years, Solomonoff developed a concept that made it possible to systematically search data for patterns—and thus reveal the hidden processes that underlie our world. Today this may be reminiscent of the way artificial intelligence works.
But Solomonoff formulated his first ideas in 1942—long before AI algorithms existed. Solomonoff's approach was based on the principle of Occam's razor, according to which the simplest explanation for a phenomenon is usually the correct one. (Physicists employ the same logic; they seek the simplest formulas to try to describe as many physical processes as possible.
) On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Solomonoff was looking for a set of rules or an algorithm that would reveal hidden relationships in data.
In this way, he hoped, everything in the world could be simply explained. For example, if you record the trajectory of a thrown baseball, you can find any number of mathematical formulas—some very complicated—that reproduce the course of the trajectory. To derive the correct law from all these possibilities, you should look for the simplest description.
The answer will most likely correspond to Newton's laws of motion, which describe the interaction of two forces: the force with which the person threw the ball and the gravitational force that brings the ball to the ground. Solomonoff was..
. Manon Bischoff.
