George Mallory, a famous English mountaineer, once suggested that it was of no use to climb mountains. Instead, he posited, the only reason to climb a mountain is because it is there. Likewise, when ...

Data manipulation is at the heart of computation, and a system is said to be Turing-complete if it can be configured to manipulate data in a way that makes implementing arbitrary computation possible.

In 1999’s The Matrix, life as we know it is actually a virtual reality abstraction; a collection of well-shaped zeroes and ones which add up to an utterly convincing simulation of the real world.