An excerpt:
"Wolfram goes off onto something else. He talks about searching through the space of possible computer programs, for ones of a certain type that can solve problems, rather than the having to go through the labor of humans programming something for a specific task. His meaning is more than a little unclear here. Wolfram says we're constrained to follow historical patterns of engineering, to only create things such that we have designed them with an understanding of what they will do. Nature, he says, doesn't have this constraint. Alright, this make more sense. He's talking about mining all potential programs, including useful ones that we ourselves might not have thought of. That's quite an idea, and sounds like no small task to actually perform it.
Now he's bringing it in the direction I thought he would — comparing the search among the space of possible programs to natural selection, which is the natural equivalent of searching the space of possible biological programs. Now Wolfram is talking about whether we can search for our physical universe among the space of possible universes, and he's going still another level "meta."
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etc etc
But doesn't a search in general program space almost immediately result in a combinatorial explosion?
How on Earth are we supposed to find these programs that Wolfram dreams about?
[0] http://futurisms.thenewatlantis.com/2009/10/stephen-wolframs...