David Wolpert

David Hilton Wolpert is an American physicist and computer scientist who is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. After a B.A. in physics at Princeton in 1984 and graduate degrees at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, IBM and the NASA Ames Research Center before joining the Santa Fe Institute in 2011. His research has ranged across statistics, game theory, machine learning, information theory, optimization and complex systems. He is best known for the no free lunch theorems for search and optimization, which show that averaged over all problems no algorithm outperforms another, and he has also formalized arguments about the limits of what any intellect inside the universe can know about it.