Notice how quarks assemble into protons and neutrons, they into atoms and atoms into molecules. There is an optimization algorithm guided by the principle of least action. Similar to a solver in Excel - try all variants and find one with the minimum energy. "Living" matter is doing the same on a higher and higher scale - optimizing for better use of available energy. AI shares the same basic idea called gradient descent. Everything in the universe is computation, from the most fundamental - space itself - to human consciousness. Google Wolfram Physics for more.