The first programs he wrote for the Atlas and the Mark II ("the Baby"), seem to have been focused on a theory he had around how animals got their markings.

They look a little to me (as a non-expert in these areas, and reading them in a museum over about 15 minutes, not doing a deep analysis), like a primitive form of cellular automata algorithm. From the scrawls on the print outs, it's possible that he was playing with the space of algorithms not just the algorithms themselves.

It might be worth going back and looking at that early work he did and seeing it through this lens.

Both start from the idea that simple rules / functions can generate complex structure. Where FU adds a twist is by making a sharp distinction between possibility and history. In FU, we separate aggregation (the space of all admissible transitions - superpositions, virtual processes, rule applications) from composition (the irreversible commitment of one transition that actually enters history).

You can think of ruliology as exploring the space of possible rule evolutions, while FU focuses on how one path gets selected and becomes real, advancing proper time and building causal structure. Rules generate possibilities; commitment creates facts.

So they’re not the same thing, but I think they’re complementary: ruliology studies the landscape of rules, FU studies the boundary where possibility turns into irreversible history.

[0]https://github.com/VoxleOne/FunctionalUniverse/blob/main/doc...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/regula#Latin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomology

https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ols4/ontologies/ro/properties/http%253... https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/regology

The rest of his stuff tagged ruliology is more interesting though. Here's one connecting ML and cellular automata: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/08/whats-really-goi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science

But exactly what is the problem here? Other than perhaps a very mechanical view of the universe (which he shares with many other authors) where it is hard to explain things like consciousness and other complex behaviors.

This makes ruliology an invaluable cartography of the computational landscape, but not a foundation. It maps the territory without explaining what the territory is made of.

Didn't find anything on falsifiable criteria -- any new theory should be able, at least in theory, to be tested for being not true.