One might have thought that if the rules of a program were simple then this would mean that its behaviour must also be correspondingly simple. For our everyday experience in building things tends to give us the intuition that creating complexity is somehow difficult, and requires rules or plans that are themselves complex. But the pivotal discovery that I made some eighteen years ago is that in the world of programs such intuition is not close to correct.

Perhaps imediately the most dramatic is that it yelds a resolution to what has long been considered the single greatest mistery of the natural world: what secret is that allows nature seemingly so effortlessly to produce so much that appears to us so complex.