The Shape of Things to Come

4 minute read. Simplicity can generate vast complexity - the Mandelbrot fractal is a wonderful example. Iterating one tiny equation leads to patterns of infinite depth and detail, nearly repeating, but not quite. Computers and software are based on nothing more than the transistor logic gate and bits memory - Alan Turing realized stringing enough of them together could solve nearly any algorithmic problem. The human genome has 2.5 billion base-pairs of DNA, which is only about 600MB of data. Somehow all the information that generated you or me could fit on one CD-ROM from the '90s, even though we largely can't even fathom how our own bodies function.  Deep neural networks are a relatively simple construct that led directly to the explosion of machine learning (ML) we're witnessing today, from facial recognition to real-time translation to image generation and artificial intelligence. They are a recursive statistical process, inspired by a theory of how the brain might w