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Indeed. But crunching a few football stats is hardly something that's going to occupy such a machine for long. Plus, the thing isn't always used and wasn't built to be only used to solve the world's problems. It was built to do the calculations necessary to solve problems people care about. It's doing that.

As for "claim to have changed the world", you've something of a point there. But I'd offer two replies. First, the most spectacular pieces of technology are often used in a popular or workaday context as a demonstration to the public. This is no different and it's pretty harmless as such things go. Second, that's just Steven Wolfram for you. Have you ever read the beginning of his book? They guy's a bit of a megalomaniac. You walk away from reading that thing with the distinct impression that he believes every advancement of science over the past decades is due to the (oft uncited) application of his ideas and every failure to advance is due to a failure to understand his ideas.

It's a shitty virus that can't just change the gravimetric constant.

Nice! I'd love to see a time-lapse video over the course of the next million years watching this black sheep star get flung out of its little flock.

Interesting bit of trivia - the first computational solution discovered for the 3-body problem ended with one of the stars being flung out while the remaining two orbited each other as a binary system. It's since been found that most solutions end up this way. Here's a video of one such system ending with the middle-mass star being flung off.

You might be interested in new kind of science, where Stephen Wolfram argues that fluid (and gas) movement is a general pehonomena, which can be replicated using only very basic rules. And therefore must occur in very broad range of materials, regardless of their underlying precise rules. And he is right. I am no surprised that this also applies to heavy metal crowds.

Wolfram's New Kind of Science suggests that the universe may operate on a quantum level as a cellular automata, his idea being that complex structures can come about from simple rules. Although it's not particularly surprising that the Penrose tile system has gliders, I take this as the first interesting example of signal propogation in a non-regular model. Penrose tiles still have a lot of structure, so maybe it's still to special a case, but it's progress.

And any sufficiently complicated Prolog program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of Minesweeper.

And minesweeper is really just an ad-hoc, broken implementation of some form of Conway's Game Of Life. And thus the circle is complete. Turing-complete.

I think the main misunderstanding here is not between understanding and causality but between understanding and prediction. It is ironic that gravity is cited as an example because it was with the case of the 3 body gravitational problem that Henri Poincaré showed sensitivity to ininital conditions that we now call chaos theory - thus, a system can be fully 'understood' and fully 'causal' of the behaviour we are interested in but it may not be possible to predict long term behaviour.

I'd suggest Wolfram Summer school, http://www.wolframscience.com/summerschool/2012/ It is math-oriented programming, in Mathematica. I have not gone there myself, but Mathematica is a quite nice language. However, Stephen Wolfram is sort of strange, being obsessed by cellular automatas and all that, but otherwise, my guess is that it is a nice school.

some would argue that software is real, chemistry isn't.

The book "A New Kind of Science" by Steven Wolfram is an essential book for anyone, scientist or not. It is revolutionary in it's scope and provides proable evidence that complex systems such as life derive from simple systems in Nature. This eliminates all the silly Intelligent Design nonsense with a little bit of cellular automata that you can work out with a pencil. Chapter 2 is essential.

You can even preview any part of the book online at Wolfram Science.

For a video of wolfram presenting an overview see: Wolfram presents A New Kind of Science.

He cannot be serious.

That's what was said about a new kind of science. I think Stephen Wolfram's been 'serious' for a while now.

Palmer and Stephen Wolfram should talk.

Critics agree - he wrote A New Kind of Science during full moons.

My question is, "Does it come with nutty scientific theories included?"

Can you give some examples?

What, like compression?

It's my understanding that the initial foundation for the concept of compression was a mathematical notion in Information Theory, and it literally took 30+ years for anyone to be able to actually come up with a practical way of doing it or recognizing how useful it would be.

That's definitely an example of something being basically a concept for a few decades.

Cheers

If he's correct, it'd really be a new kind of science, wouldn't it?

You can read the full text of "A New Kind of Science" online for free at http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html

The paper at the heart of this slashdot discussion deals directly with http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-884 There are 256 boolean expressions on this page from Stephen Wolfram's book The paper claims to give 44 shorter expressions.

If you go to the NKS Forum, you can find quite a few contributions by the author of this paper, and many of them are error corrections or other disputes with the content. To try it yourself, go to the search page and type in "Evangelos Georgiadis" into the "Search by Author" field, select "Show results as posts", and click "Perform Search."

I think if you read through the posts yourself you'll see his overall interest seems to be in improving the text, not tearing it down. In fact, one of the threads he created is called "Further Improvements and Errata."

If you go to the NKS Forum, you can find quite a few contributions by the author of this paper, and many of them are error corrections or other disputes with the content. To try it yourself, go to the search page and type in "Evangelos Georgiadis" into the "Search by Author" field, select "Show results as posts", and click "Perform Search."

I think if you read through the posts yourself you'll see his overall interest seems to be in improving the text, not tearing it down. In fact, one of the threads he created is called "Further Improvements and Errata."

The author of the article, Evangelos Georgiadis, has participated in two of the "New Kind of Science" summer schools (2003, 2005; the link above is from 2003). I must suspect, then, that he is somewhat sympathetic to Wolfram's work, and his papers are not intended to be hostile attacks. Indeed, his paper really doesn't read that way, from my perspective as an academic; it is simply a correction of errors. Indeed, if anything, this work tends to buttress Stephen Wolfram's basic point (whether it is true or not) because it further reduces the complexity of CA implementations.

That is a very inflammatory title. The page in question is: http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-884 Comparing the items in the paper to this page, there isn't much here.

my very humble proposition is that an ordered system can only arise from a random/chaotic state. See for example Wolfram's work on rules and laws governing systems and the "phenomena" of complexity arising from simpler governing laws.

This guy should get together with Mr. Wolfram. It sounds like these ideas overlap a lot with the stuff in his (highly recommded) "A New Kind of Science": http://www.wolframscience.com/

>Jeez, Can someone please give me the short version explanation about why everyone is bagging on Wolfram?

- Wolfram makes it looks like he invented everything about cellular automata, not giving credit where it is due (especially Konrad Zuse).
- Wolfram works with stuff like Non-Disclosure Agreements on mathematical issues, which is not academic ethos. He forbade the publication of a fundamental mathematical proof by one of his employees.
- Wolfram masturbates far to much in his New Kind of Science.

Well, that's a good start: you accepting you are not an expert in the field but pretending to judge something that of course experts reviewed. It is nice that people like you think on this problem and possible flaws, though. Of course nobody is changing the well stablished definition of a Turing machine. But it is accepted even by the experts that there is no clear definition on universality. You should follow all the FOM posts and not only those that you think are better to critic others.[...]

Here is the explanation about the suposed "flaw", which of course it is not:

http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1472 And my comments on the guy that thinks that the universality definition was changed for the prize benefit (I am surprised about how many people write about this without knowing a bit of the subject and trying to sound technical talking about "AND gates" completely nonsense):

Concerning the definition of universality, a halting state or halting instruction wasn't a requirement. This is a common usage nowadays in the field of small universal Turing machines, which is a generalization of previous definitions.

If there is no clear definition is because there is no clear-cut, established procedure to determine when an initial condition is computationally simple enough to be acceptable. Some would wish universal computation stick to a finite initial condition with an unbounded tape filled with "blanks", because that's the only case where the theory is entirely clear. However, others accept generalizations such as periodic "blank" words as long as they remain computationally simple enough (possibly generated in the same fashion as an unbounded "blank" tape).

Here is the explanation about the suposed "flaw", which of course it is not: http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1472 And my comments on the guy that thinks that the universality definition was changed for the prize benefit (I am surprised about how many people write about this without knowing a bit of the subject and trying to sound technical talking about "AND gates" completely nonsense): Concerning the definition of universality, a halting state or halting instruction wasn't a requirement. This is a common usage nowadays in the field of small universal Turing machines, which is a generalization of previous definitions. If there is no clear definition is because there is no clear-cut, established procedure to determine when an initial condition is computationally simple enough to be acceptable. Some would wish universal computation stick to a finite initial condition with an unbounded tape filled with "blanks", because that's the only case where the theory is entirely clear. However, others accept generalizations such as periodic "blank" words as long as they remain computationally simple enough (possibly generated in the same fashion as an unbounded "blank" tape). So Alex Smith's use of a non-periodic but still sufficiently computationally simple background is a natural generalization of this sort. The key point is that the background can be set up without doing universal computation, so the 2,3 machine itself actually carries out the computation. We are glad that this is making a contribution to the discussion on universality. We expect that others will further clarify what Alex Smith has done. We particularly hope that his methods can be extended to other similar proofs.

Smith's use of non-repetitive infinite initial conditions is controversial, but is a natural extension of current definitions which allow infinite repetitive initial conditions. We hope that the ensuing discussion will enrich debate in the scientific community concerning the nature of computational universality.

Whenever a generalization of the definition of a universal Turing machine is put forward, that the status of some machines will necessarily change from 'non-universal' to 'universal'. It is a challenge to explicitly construct a machine with initial conditions similar in spirit to Smith's, that is obviously too simple to be considered universal, and which is performing a universal computation with those infinite initial conditions.

"The status of some machines will necessarily change from 'non-universal' to 'universal'"??? This sounds like a cop-out to justify the error in the proof: re-define the problem so the proof fits it.

Let's generalize the definition of FLT (Fermat's Last Theorem) to include n=2. It seems to me this is a "natural extension" of its current definition. Guess what, I have a truly marvelous proof that FLT in a generalized sense is false, which the margin of this post is not too narrow to contain: 3^2+4^2=5^2.

Seriously, once you have fixed the statement of a problem in mathematics, there is no "controversy" as to whether it is true, false, or undecidable, and a correct proof will show which one of these three is be the case. Someone else can't come along and show that another of these three is the case, unless one of the proofs is flawed (or unless the foundations of math are inconsistent, which would be a major discovery in itself). In this case it appears that Smith's proof is flawed and simply does not prove the stated problem. It sounds like Wolfram Research is twisting the definition of the problem to save face, rather than just admitting the proof is flawed and moving on.

Earlier in that post,

Alex Smith did not only show that the encoding of the initial condition is non-universal. He showed that the encoding is very computationally weak and then concludes that the Turing machine is universal in a generalized sense.

Since you are posting from the heart of the Wolfram Hype Machine (TM), perhaps you could comment on why the prize was announced by Wolfram Himself as being successfully awarded, when Martin Davis on the FOM list states that the committee members were not polled.

This appears to be a flagrant violation of the rules for the prize, which state that "For the purposes of this prize, the treatment of universality in any particular submission must be considered acceptable by the Prize Committee."

To make my question crystal clear: how is it possible that the committee deemed the proof (or its treatment of universality) acceptable when at least some of them were not polled as to whether they thought the proof was acceptable?

p.s. Please don't appeal to a "New Kind of Logic" or a "New Kind of English" in your answer.

I'm posting from Wolfram Research. Basically, a message from Vaughan Pratt was posted to the correct spot, the FOM list. Dr. Pratt likely didn't expect his message to get a late night SlashDot level exposure. A response to his message has already been sent to the FOM list, but it is a moderated list, and the response is not visible yet. Here is a copy of the FOM posting from Todd Rowland, from the Wolfram prize committee. http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1472 This is how math is done ... trying to poke holes in proofs.

Actually, if the committee had reviewed it, I would consider that peer review (assuming they were not paid by Wolfram Media) -- insofar as a candidate journal article passing the review of anonymous referees is peer review -- since the committee contains heavyweights like Dana Scott, Martin Davis, Yuri Matiyasevich, etc.

Any work that was reviewed by and deemed correct by all the members of that committee would have passed a far more stringent peer review process than just about any Journal paper. Withstanding extended peer review after publication is another matter though.

Having said that, it looks like the committee did not actually review the paper in this case, but were merely "kept informed" (whatever that means), as Martin Davis states here.

The definition of 'universal' used in for the competition is not precisely defined, but rather skirted around; see the section "Uses of the Term Universality" (which for some reason doesn't have an anchor, so I can't link to it directly) in the technical details of the prize. Instead of 'halting', the Turing machine in the proof exhibits behaviour that can be considered to be equivalent to halting; there are points in the tape where if the Turing machine moves to their right, it never goes back to their left again, so the information there is preserved as long as the machine is running, and particular sorts of configurations of the section between two such points can be interpreted as saying that the machine has 'halted' (if it generates such a configuration, then every time one of those points is passed the next section will also have a similar configuration, and so on for ever, so the machine is no longer doing any useful computation but instead just doing the equivalent of a very busy busy-wait where it recalculates what it's already calculated over and over again).

However TFA's suggested use of its explanation as a way of addressing resistance to other counterintuitive concepts like Darwinian evolution is something new, and worth thinking about for a few minutes.

The same concept has been already worked in a much exhaustive way by Stephen Wolfram in 'A new kind of science', if you avoid the hype and the ego on the book there's a good deal of innovative ideas about how to treat computationally those kind of domains.

> It'd seem data passed through an encrypter would be less random that would mean a serious weakness of the crypto-algo; "The most common precise definition of the randomness of a string of digits or of a sequence of black and white cells on a tape is that it is random if there is no way of describing it with a string of shorter length." -- http://forum.wolframscience.com/printthread.php?s= 92e4c3a7f4b586209fe7057ac05dd7b3&threadid=1413 plaintext is usually not very random, that is, it can be compressed significantly; in this case: randomness(plaintext + crypto.key + crypto.algo) is low, but cryptographic algorithms are designed with the key feature in mind, that crypto-text should reflect the least possible structure of the plaintext; therefore encrypted data is undistinguishable from random, until the encription is considered broken

From the website: There is a large amount of relevant material in A New Kind of Science.

Does it have an explanation of the colour/state pictures he's so fond of showing?

The {state, colour} -> {state, colour, offset} description that makes sense relative to the image below it shown here http://www.wolframscience.com/prizes/tm23/technica ldetails.html is counter-intuitive: W->0, Y->1, R->2. This means the rules shown in the image are the same, but in a totally different order than the rules as described in the text. What a clever way to confuse the interested but naive reader.

Call it a pet peeve, but this kind of third-rate presentation and lack of explanation does not bode well for the clarity of the rest of the thinking going in to the problem.

It may be interesting to those who aren't just here to bash Wolfram that this offer to provide a prize for a proof of one of his key conjectures in A New Kind of Science (NKS) comes only seven weeks after another key conjecture was disproved. (The fact that that disproof was brought to public notice by the NKS Forum moderator might suggest that the ongoing NKS project is happy enough for results to fall whichever way they will.)

On a visit to Champaign-Urbana in the late 1980s, still before he officially started on NKS, Wolfram took me through where he felt his cellular automata research was headed which hinted at some of the inferences he would eventually draw from his mountains of research data. That was even before the Santa Fe Institute paper which was foolishly read as retreating from the edge of chaos-border of order which had briefly been the focus of the quest for the source of emergent complexity during the 1980s.

The resources Wolfram is bringing to the table are significant and have certainly helped put complex systems back in the spotlight after far too many of the first generation of researchers were seduced by the marginal returns they could get by applying their methods to the derivatives market, no matter whether their methods made a significant difference or not.

The downside of continuing to focus on the simplest possible mechanisms (Wolfram calls them 'programs') as the source of a critical threshold is that all those much sought after proofs of universality, from the early one for Conway's Life on, are vast feats of engineering and thus make no useful progress towards the implicit goal of helping to explain how we/anything got here in the first place.

So I'll keep playing with my own idiosyncratic program to explore a bit deeper in that narrow and difficult transition region between order and chaos, but might be tempted to have another look at Mathematica's increasing support for such research once it is available via CP6AN.

> From the website: There is a large amount of relevant material in A New Kind of Science.

From the website: Immediate free online access - full text and advanced features:

http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html

Crazy NKS "goodness" for your reading "pleasure": here .

Trust me, even if it is free, after reading it, you'll want your "free" back.

Is it just me... or is this graph not family-appropriate?

Personally, I take it that his ego has to be ignored; it definitely infects the writing style. However, the ideas are new, quite elegant, and very, very basic. I don't think they're a rehash, though there are topics (cellular automata) that have had some work done on them. He's not just talking about cellular automata themselves, he's talking about the way the universe works and he actually shows the same mechanisms underlying large portions of math that underlie everything from shell growth to turing machines. Not the other way around. He then turns some ideas over about how we think, reason... I wouldn't sell the book short if I were you. If its too spendy (about $50, I think) get your library to get a copy or just read it online.

I read it somewhat online, then decided I wanted it in my library and bought it, then I started over and read it to the end. I really, really enjoyed it.

You should go read A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram.
It's full of this kind of stuff, in florid detail. You can even read a sample chapter at the site.

CA pigmentation models

First page shows sample animal patterns, next 3 show CA emulations of them.

There is also this history note about Turing's work on this -

Full credit given to Turing for the idea

The nearby notes are also relevant...

CA pigmentation models

First page shows sample animal patterns, next 3 show CA emulations of them.

There is also this history note about Turing's work on this -

Full credit given to Turing for the idea

The nearby notes are also relevant...

I think that Wolfram is the only published and highly regarded scientist really trying hard to think outside of the box now days. If you study the last iterations of the theories of the Universe revolving around the earth, you will see what complexity in trying to make everything fit perfectly.

Dr. Wolfram (of Mathematica) offers PDFs of his book for free here (or pay $60 for hardcopy):

http://www.wolframscience.com/thebook.html

I do suggest you at least glance over the first few chapters, look at the pictures.

Also note that the guy got his PhD in Physics at the age of 18 I believe.