The more complex our world becomes, the more simplicity it needs.

This quest for simplicity has become the holy grail of science, whether in the form of physicist Stephen Hawking's TOE and his lifetime pursuit of a Theory of Everything (TOE), or theoretical physicist Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" (the title of his 2002 book).

Wolfram, a Ph.D. at 20 from Caltech, proposes that instead of looking for more and more complex theories to creation, we should be looking for simpler ones (primitives, he calls them). Complex results do not require complex designs. A simple 8 bit code could produce variety and randomness on a huge scale using what he calls cellular automatons. All of creation, Wolfram argues, could be based on only 4 or 5 lines of programming code.

How's this for a simple …