From a New York Times obit by Alex Williams headlined “Edward Fredkin, 88, Who Saw the Universe as One Big Computer, Dies”:

Edward Fredkin, who despite never having graduated from college became an influential professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a pioneer in artificial intelligence and a maverick theorist who championed the idea that the entire universe might function like one big computer, died in Brookline, Mass.

Fueled by a seemingly limitless scientific imagination and a blithe indifference to conventional thinking, Professor Fredkin charged through an endlessly mutating career that could appear as mind-warping as the iconoclastic theories that made him a force in both computer science and physics.