Konrad Zuse, Who Built The First Programmable Computer And Then Argued The Universe Is One

The Z3 claim needs every one of its qualifiers. It was the first programmable, automatic, digital computer that worked. It was not electronic, it did not store its program in memory, and it had no way to branch. He raised the quantum objection against himself. Calculating Space says in its own pages that a model behaving according to quantum physics would be extremely difficult to build. Summaries that present him as having answered it are overstating his case. He also guessed the symmetry objection, decades early. Zuse wrote that a grid structure would abolish the isotropy of space and would be hard to reconcile with relativity. Fritz in 2013 and Hossenfelder in 2015 proved him right. Bell tests rule out the classical version. A deterministic classical cellular automaton is a local hidden-variable theory, and loophole-free experiments since 2015 have closed that door. The surviving route runs through qubits, not bits. Quantum cellular automata are discrete and local without being hidden-variable theories. That saves the idea and concedes the original point. Plankalkuel was compiled in his lifetime. Joachim Hohmann built a compiler in a 1975 dissertation, twenty years before Zuse died. What is true is that it never ran on one…