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The Universe in 4 Lines of Code?
serendigital writes "Stephen Wolfram, founder of Wolfram Research and creator of Mathematica has, after 10 years+ finished his book, "A New Kind of Science." In a "Wired" article entitled: The Man Who Cracked The Code to Everything ...," Steven Levy talks about how and why the book was written and more importantly, what it is about. The best part of the article is in this exchange: 'I've got to ask you,' I say. 'How long do you envision this rule of the universe to be?' ... 'I don't know. In Mathematica, for example, perhaps three, four lines of code.'" This book seems a little... nutty. But it's been submitted a bunch of times. If anyone wants to review it, go right ahead.
This is silly. The universe is far too simple to be explained by mathematics.
A *real* god would do it in but a single line of Perl.
but whats the question?
-----------------
That's all I have to say.
I managed to get it a week ago because I work at a bookstore. I'm about halfway through, and so far it's overrated. The demonsrated cellular automata are very cool, but Wolfram constantly confuses similar behavior for causation. After the first 300 pages describing various kinds of CAs, he slips into pure "I suspect" and "Probably" and "Very likely" mode without really explaining why he suspects the things he does. The wildest thing he's stated so far (without any real evidence, just lots of "It is my strong belief") is that space and time are discrete on a very small scale, and are stuctured as a network of nodes. He doesn't (yet) go so far as saying that the universe is actually a simulation running in a computer. Maybe he will later in the book. Most of the rest of it seems to be concerned with the limits of computation.
In his credit, he does make a good argument that much of nature is based on processes analogous to CAs, particularly the growth of plants and pigmentation patterns on animals. But again there's lots of "I believe" and practically no "I've observed."
void main()
{
int = 42;
}
$ is_there_a_god
There is now.
$ _
Looks like he's rediscovered chaos theory - simple input intp simple equations give complex outputs; he thinks he can find the simple input which generates the universe from a chaos producing equation.
4 lines?
is that, like, doable? it has to code not just the rules, but all the initial conditions. 4 big lines, maybe.
4 lines of perl, of course!
Ah said, ah say, ah said how long do you envision this rule of the universe to be?
His point about the universe, which is also something that more and more people are coming to believe and really, an idea that has been around for a long time before his book is that everything that everything in the universe is computation, or, at least, that's a way of looking at the universe that gives you deep insights.
It still doesn't beat Knuth's AoCP books! Its almost twenty years. Right? I await patiently for the day...
The book sounds superficially like David Deutsch's "The Fabric of Reality", which tries to try everything together using a computational theory of reality + the multiverse intrepretation of quantum mechanics.
Deutsch believes that the simulation of something at a deep enough level is entirely equivalent to the real thing -- which is another way of stating this authors belief that reality is just an algorithm. I personally think it's at least as good a metaphysics as anything else I've read...
Websurfing done Right! StumbleUpon
augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
We mere mortals do likewise, but won't be able to fit it on 80 characters.
Ah, but while Perl is a nice language, it isn't purely functional. No, Haskell is the only real choice here. Since I'm no way expert in that language, I'm not so sure of this, but I think Haskell had its own whitespace rules, so you wouldn't be able to fit it on one line.
(I'm only posting this to prevent further entirely predictable jokes. My apologies.)
#include
int main() {
start_universe();
return; }
Yup, that's 4.
-
"If anyone wants to review it, go right ahead."
Ouch... It'll be a while before any reviews get submitted, Michael -- it's HUGE! (Page 2 of the article: "At 1,280 pages, the book pushes the limit of what can be physically bound between two covers.") Levy talks about it dwarfing (!!!) a phone book... though it would depend on what phone book you're trying to dwarf.Wolfram's demands regarding publishing are interesting -- the book is going to cost $12 to actually produce (5x to 6x that of a "normal" book, though the extra size certainly has to be a factor!), and be priced at $45 -- it includes large quantities of high-rez graphics. Also, it went through alphas and betas, like software -- not versions or revisions as writers are familiar with.
Definitely something I'm going to read... although I doubt I'll achieve full comprehension. The "A New Kind of Science Explorer" software should be fun to play with -- but will I have to wait another 10 years for that?
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Don't be compiling in Windows, don't need to go crashing the Universe now.
There's a discussion about Wolfram's theory in the current issue of BusinessWeek as well; it just came today so I haven't had a chance to read it yet.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
5!/5+2+7+9=42
1) Anybody is surprised and
b) It took so long
All real Haskell code uses the "layout" rule, in which whitespace is meaningful, bit it's entirely optional, and defined by translation to the whitespace-free language. See section 2.7 of the Haskell 98 Report.
So, yes, Haskell is perfect, except: even if God plays dice, there is absolutely no way he uses n+k patterns.
I Can't Believe It's A Law Firm, LLP does not necessarily endorse the contents of this message.
In related news,
Bill Gates concurred while noting that those four lines of course referenced msie.dll to get the job done.
Conway's Life is Turing-Complete
Implying that a four-line Mathematica program (or so; I don't know Mathematica that well, but Conway's life is pretty simple) can compute any computable funtion.
It's not unreasonable to suggest that simple rules lead to great complexity; the Turing machine itself is pretty simple.
Four lines?! I don't know where this Wolfram guy was trained, but I can declare the constant 42 in a single line. Well, I suppose that does leave 3 lines for comments. And if anything was worth commenting...
Wolfram says on his web site that he's NOT redoing physics. Simulation is not causation and doesn't even have to closely follow reality as long as it gives some useful output. So I guess the simple equations he digs up are to simulate many things on computer.
A much better book is "Radical Nature: Rediscovering the Soul of Matter" by Christian deQuincey. Plus it's a lot cheaper!
This book is apparently on back order everywhere, in stock nowhere. My local Barnes and Noble had it on order well before the release date, and almost a week later, they say they won't be getting it until their distribution center gets some, and the distribution center is still waiting for 20,000 copies.
For reference, usually new books hit the stores *on* the day of release.
Ironic, it's been the Amazon number 1 seller six days running, but my local bookstore ordered only six copies. And this in a high tech area!
yeah... i think someone's been watching the movie "" a bit too much... yep.
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
if (argc==2)
{
argv[1]=NULL;
}
return 42;
}
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Leibniz's monads are the same thing, no?
*
Oops that is only one line.
Stephen is an amazing guy, and I'm sure what he's done is something absolutely marvellous. I'm also sure, however, that his attitude will continue to suck for great lengths of time. He's probably one of the most arrogant people on this planet. I think he said it best himself regarding what he thinks people will say about his book:
my opinion of the world at large isn't high enough for me really to be interested in what they have to say
Now, if that's not a bad attitude I don't know what is. I suppose he could be excused though. He's pretty much as close to the stereotype mad scientist recluse as anyone will ever get.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
package org.god.universe ;
;
; ; ;
// repeat
import org.god.nothing.Nothing
/**
* Ok, so it's not four lines of code when
* written in Java. But it works on any
* platform.
*/
public class Universe extends Nothing {
public Universe ( )
throws MatterConservationException {
while ( true ) {
doBigBang()
doBigCrunch()
doRinse()
}
}
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
... and here's that one line :]
perl -e "print 42;"
just remove all but 4 cr-lf's (\n)
"The Universe in 4 Lines of Code?"
Do you ever get the feeling there is a bug in one of those lines?
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Or rather, 7 lines, but the last one is sleep(86400).
Derelict
#include universe.h
int main() {
universe *test = new universe(); test->solveuniverse();
}
He's selling Mathematica with this book
Went from being a magazine glorifying technology to a magazine glorifying CEO's. In that same issue it has a lengthy article promoting globalization.
Perhaps I'm being too rash (haven't read the book, but I certainly will), but it seems we cannot apply this theory to predict anything about our own universe, simply because applying cellular automaton methods would require incredibly detailed measurements of initial conditions. We can't measure the positions and momenta of all particles (thank you dear Heisenberg) in order to predict weather or cosmology, and the innumerable factors affecting theories of finance, politics, biology and others are likely to be beyond the reach of measurement as well. Pity.
Perhaps if combined with some sort of Monte Carlo simulation, it might have some applications: specify a million scenarios and compute probabilities for visible effects. Still, the same thing can be achieved with current computational models at lower computing cost than the tiny scale of a CA model would require.
Lastly, if found, the rule will be beyond proof. It will just be a rule that generates systems within computer simulations that are similar to observed phenomena. Good enough for some perhaps, but anything that's beyond proof tends to take on a theological flavor. Not my kind of thing.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
....
now, as for void Universe::doStuff() however, that can NOT be represented in 4 lines of code.
As PERL is the swiss army chainsaw of computer programming, Mathematica is the swiss army chainsaw of mathematics. The syntax isn't as forgiving as PERL, but it's not bad. Here's a snippit I use for singular value decomposition:
{u, md, v} = svout;
Print["u is ", u//MatrixForm];
I've done the same thing with LAPACK and CLAPACK (scientific programming libraries) and in 3 lines of FORTRAN, C or C++ you haven't even started to define your data. In Mathematica, you're already done.
Then there's visualization. Running on a PC or via XWindows, Mathematica can do stunning graphics -- including interactive graphics -- with almost no coding. It's not entirely flexible (sort of like using SAS or SPSS' graphics routines), but again you can do astoundingly great things with almost no code.
In short, Mathematica is very close, for mathematics, to what PERL is for programming (or insert your favorite programming language or toolkit - but I think PERL fits best). While in the olden days of CGI everyone would have their own copy of cgi-lib.pl, now PERL has this functionality built in -- we just do stuff like do stuff like "my $query = new CGI;". In Mathematica, the language has evolved similarly so that stuff you needed to write lots of code for previously is now abstracted to a few functions. Like PERL's ability to use modules, you can write your own add-ons for Mathematica. Like PERL's POD, Mathematica can be used for documentation (and *was* used to write the Mathematica Book, and presumably Wolfram's new book).
Just a few words about Mathematica. Give it a try, if you're remotely interested in how this stuff works. You'll probably like it!
Instead of ads on pages, why not have a slashdot referrer thingy for links to amazon.com in book reviews/discussions?
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
is that the observable universe is defined by calculus and differential equations in very small areas: planetery motion, for example, or atomic physics.
Phenomena like life, geology and the like are very badly behaved with respect to our standard mathematical tools and we all know this.
Wolfram is suggesting that cellular automata provide a simple framework for examining the phenomena outside of the "magic circle" of the calculus: i.e. most of life and the universe.
Of course, for a long time we've confused hard science with the application of calculus, which has effected what we consider "science" to be: if it is not an equation, we don't think it's scientific.
Well,
1> go talk to some biologists
2> get used to it: equations got us this far, but after this it may be increasingly about computation.
Consider, for example, the Four Color Theorem - the only existing proof of which requires a lot of computer power to grind through cases. Is it a valid proof? Probably - but not to the standards of mathematicians who grew up in the pre-computer age, to whom an exhaustively checked list of cases does not look like mathematics at all.
We'll see how Wolfram's work fares over time, but my bet is that it will fare Quite Well.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
"With patience, insight, and self-confidence to spare...."
Most intersting was his claim that the single rule of the universe could be defined in a few lines of code if it were a well-designed language (so stop coding in C++ *grin*). I would suspect that the rule, if it exists, looks much like an obfuscated C program - subtle, with side-effects that have important ramifications a few iterations later.
Now, what penatly does God traditionally hand out for hubris? Still, I can't wait to read it.
Nice.
Moderators, please check a3d0a3m's posting history before moderating.
See, for example, this and this
Think about it.
He owns a company producing software for mathematical and numerical computations.
Then he starts out writing a book that he claims will revolutionise all science and how we look at the universe -- by using computational models instead of the traditional scientific methods.
Then he bypasses the normal peer-review system of science (like submitting his works to scientific journals), publishing the book himself, filling it with elaborate, high-class computer graphics, sells it with a low margin of profit, and clearly aims it at a wider audience -- to convince people that all science, from physics to social sciences, should be done with computational models.
Isn't it obvious what this guy is trying to do?
He's just trying to sell more copies of Mathematica!
\/MOD DOWN\/ Fucking Retarded
Ray Kurzweil, the inventor, AI theorist, and author of The Age of Spiritual Machines, has a long review of the book available here.
One of the key points of the review is that while Kurzweil agrees that certain levels of complexity can be achieved, higher levels of complexity are simply not derivable from cellular automaton, the generator of Wolfram's complexities.
To quote Kurzweil: There is a missing link here in how one gets from the interesting, but ultimately routine patterns of a cellular automaton to the complexity of persisting structures that demonstrate higher levels of intelligence. For example, these class 4 patterns are not capable of solving interesting problems, and no amount of iteration moves them closer to doing so.
In this state, dwarfing is illegal, even if the dwarf signs a release.
this needs moderating down too.
Human math and theory at this point does not allow for expansive-yet-accurate enough descriptions of phenomena. But the again, IAMAM/P.
sig-free as of 28 July 02!
That doesn't compile. Oh well, what else should I expect from Open Source code?
You could also check out some of Wolfram's work online if you don't remember how to use paper...
c le s/ca/
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/arti
"Black holes are where God divided by zero." - Steven Wright
Mr. Wolfram probably is the biggest fraud of the 20th century. Groomed in his youth as the intellectual successor of Albert Einstein, his contributions to the field of theoretical physics have so far been insignificant.
Of course, no mention how long those line are...
on the cover of this book it says "do not open until "
by the time you open it the date has changed so you never know when to open or close it it's a randomhouse book
From what I've seen in various places, he's trying to describe everything in terms of cellular automata.
But a cellular automaton is just the discrete version of a differential equation. Physics has been described in terms of differential equations for 150 years.
So is he getting any new insights? Simplifying the calculations? Or is he just rearranging the the mathematical furniture?
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
As a letter writer to Salon points out, it seems that Wolfram thinks that he's discovered Complexity Theory all by himself. The Salon article certainly gives that impression -- not having read the book, I can't make my own judgment.
The Salon writer writes as if cellular automata were some silly mathematical curiosity (or worse, the writer thinks that CA is recent to computing) that Wolfram "rediscovered" and took seriously for the first time. Of course that's absurd.
The Santa Fe Institute was founded jointly around 1984 by the eminent Nobel Laureate, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, and several others. Stuart Kauffman has researched and written on complexity for many years.
I myself have been following, as a layperson, complexity theory for about fifteen years. In 1991 I had the opportunity to be an undergraduate intern -- an opportunity I didn't follow up on because of my severe academic workload, but an opportunity I will always regret not taking advantage of. Undergraduate intern positions are much more competitive now. This eleven years has made the difference between "bleeding edge" and "cutting edge". Or perhaps complexity theory is even mainstream. I've noticed a burgeoning graduate school interest in complexity studies programs.
Complexity theory intersects many disciplines, and it involves several related ideas such as chaos theory, modeling, self-reference, artificial life, and others. It's evolved into a fairly rigorous discipline, and the more formalized idea of "complex adaptive systems" forms the core. For those who have read Douglas Hofstadter's book, Godel, Escher, Bach, (a very influential book for many of us) published around '82, many of these ideas will be familiar.
Wolfram's quip that seems so risible is really only an overstatement of the central idea of complexity theory: that a limited number of "rules" can give rise to extremely complex behavior. This was the surprise of cellular automata, exemplified by Conway's "Life", invented in 1970. But the underlying idea goes as far back as John von Neumann. Wolfram has done some interesting work in CA. But it sure as hell isn't his idea. For many in the Slashdot community, this is all as familiar as the back of their hands. But apparently there's still a lot of people that should be aware of this stuff that are not.
Finally, many people here would probably be interested to know that SimCity's designer, and Maxis, have had some association with SFI. This makes sense because the emergent behaviors of complex systems are not (as a practical matter) deductively predictable -- their behavior must be studied. The techniques of systems modeling are requisite. SimCity was the general public's first accessible insight into just how fascinating and educational systems modeling can be.
Pythagoras, or, as I have had occasion to hear many physicists of more modern times state it:
The only reality is number.
KFG
that joints jumpin
That dosen't make the complexity that exists in the universe unimportant. It's the RAM that counts. The massive storage and corresponding computation, the size and scale of it, that matters.
After all, an Alpha, a K7, and the microcontroller in my digital waltch, are all made from a few types of logic gates, but an Alpha can calculate a lot more. It has more capacity. The universe, assuming that it is all based on a few lines of code, can exhibit so much more still, due to being so vast.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
Though physically unimposing with a soft, round face and a droll English accent polished at Eton and Oxford, Wolfram had already established himself...
Does he go by Tungsten when he's in the US?
One to declare the constant. Another to print it - if your program can't tell anyone the Secret of Life, the Universe, and Anything, it's useless. The remaining two lines are a loop allowing you to either exit the program, or print the Ultimate Number again (if for some reason the user wants to double-check).
I'm the stranger...posting to
I pre-ordered this book from Amazon and have been reading it the last two days. It has some flaws; often, for example, Wolfram will put forward an idea or assertion and then simply leave it there, without support. Other times what he's saying is, like, "duh, that's obvious." Much of what he's written is stuff that seems very straightforward. But the reason it seems straightforward is that he's basically taking a qualitative approach as opposed to the traditional quantitative approach. As in, "look, these CAs reproduce patterns that look remarkably like mollusk shells," or, "here's a CA that produces the exact kind of turbulance behind a moving plate that we see in a wind tunnel." Which is all very interesting. It gets really wild when he starts talking about the fundamental structure of the universe. I was really excited at this point because for five or six years now I've imagined the basic structure as a network of nodes that follow simple combinatoric rules, which is exactly what he described. I had already figured that relativity and motion and mass and gravity and such could easily be derived from these nets, but I had trouble figuring out how to deal with quantum superposition... so I was really eager to see how Wolfram solved that problem. The letdown: he didn't. He basically said, "it's easy to see how we get motion and mass and gravity and relativity... and I'm sure we can get quantum mechanics out of it too, if we run much more complicated simulations than any that I've run." In short, he flaked out. Still, there's a lot of good stuff in the book to recommend it. And for all you bozos who think it's not possible to express the entire nature of the universe in four lines of code (or even four lines of ENGLISH): Wolfram is absolutely right about the claim, he just hasn't achieved it yet. Read the book before you say "nay."
well... maybe God (note the capital g) considers the bible to be one line?
If Wolfram is right then randomness, depending on how you define it, doesn't exist. Everything, and I do mean evertyhing, would depend on a small sets of rules which have created sub-rules over time. The end result, life, might seem complex but is, ultimately, predictable. Therefore, love, for example, is nothing more than complexity that have arisen from simplicity.
The next big question then would be : How did those simple rules got created anyway?
a3d0a3m is a troll god! fooking brilliant.
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
oh maybee this "God" is a creation of the primitive mind because they cannot comprehend the fact that they are just a machine, an advanced one, but a machine that will eventually be shut off and become usless.
The Truth: There is no string:)
The book sounds like a belated promo for cellular automata (that stuff was cool a few decades ago when Conway at Princeton was playing around with the game of Life on his computer ... Conway is a real mathematician by the way who has done some very legitimate work.)
The real genius of Wolfram is not his "formula" that claims to explain the world, but how he has bilked universities and research institutes around the world in the untold millions for Mathematica site licenses.
It is not an understatement to call Wolfram the Microsoft of scientific computing software. Both Gates and Wolfram dropped out of academia to create their respective computing empires. Both use proprietary data formats to lock in their customers. Both go to school campuses and offer students the "first hit" for free.
Gates' used a little of Dad's money (wealthy Washington lawyer) to get his start. Wolfram, in a stroke of true genius, used his McArthur grant to set up shop.
The book is just a farce to make the hungry PhD Computer Science students who bang their heads trying to fix the bugs in Mathematica (and there are many) feel like Wolfram is doing something useful for his hefty paycheck while they sweat over their mundane chores. Can't you just hear them whispering to each other "When is Stevie Wonderboy going to tell us how the universe got started?"
If you are at a university that has a site license for Mathematica, ask the university to consider canceling the license and purchasing the open-source REDUCE system instead. It is an older product than Mathematica and lacks a slick GUI interface. This is no longer a problem though because REDUCE interfaces nicely with TeXmacs, and if you haven't heard about the latter, check out this Metafont-based WYSIWYG scientific editor at www.texmacs.org.
Just my 2 cents worth; done ranting :)
Um... guess Kurzweil didn't read the book. While CAs are often-used examples in the book, Wolfram really is using them as easily-consumed examples of simple rules that produce complexity. For other things (like his attempt to describe the universe) he goes beyond CAs. In fact, he discards both the notion of "space" and "time" at that point; his automata are not at all cellular, and lack a global clock to synchronize their updates.
Although he does hedge by saying we could only extrapolate some things.
I don't understand how millionaires can be greedy for more money. Why doesn't he just publish his ideas openly and allow peer review like most scientists? He claims that people only understood part of what he had done so he had to go it alone. Talk about ego; And if he couldn't explain it to his colleagues way back when why does he think publishing a book for "everyone" is going to explain it any better?
Going the 'hype' route of mass media, as this seems to be, would be a good strategy to get yourself a bit more famous and make some more bucks. But I don't think it is a good strategy for changing scientific thought.
note: This was my response from his interview last september, not upon reading the book.
*Real* programmers don't use \n.
deus does not exist but if he does
This sounds a lot like Ed Fredkin's Digital Mechanics theories. Which isn't surpising, considering that Wolfram and Fredkin used to work together.
Guess Erwin's six lines isn't so impressive after all...
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca
Which "class" of patterns (patterns of what? cellular automata? what does this quote refer to?) do you have to get to before you can define a turing machine?
:)
What "class" is conway's life?
I imagine this is described in the book, but i haven't read the book
{billing example} ...... $1.00 ... $999.00
Changing One Line of Code
Knowing Which Line To Change
-braxton
For those of you who have actually read the article, and know something about the changes in physics he is proposing:
I fear that the poor man has forgotten about entropy (chaos, whatever you want to call it). It seems silly these days to even suggest that you could predict such complex systems as those he suggests (free will?). Non linear dynamics is not solely based on equasions and "old" math. It is very much rooted in computation, iteration, cellular structure and the like. However, I will absolutely read his book. If he turns out to be right... well, that would be something.
If the whole book is full of his explainations along the lines that:
"I can just do them and can know absolutely - definitively - I got the right answer and understand what's going on."
without some sort evidence to back it up, that's a different story.
Firstly, don't separate space and time, grasshopper! Further, quantum physics is built on the notion of discrete values and phenomena. Planck length and Planck time seem to be the granularity of the universe. Hence, Wolfram is not as far out as you imply.
Think of it this way: computers give us a new metaphor to understand the universe. Just as clockwork provided a model of a mechanical universe of cause and effect, computers and cellular automata give rise to the vision of a complex universe built from a simple ruleset running on a grid of computers.
Hey, look there is this search engine called google.
In addition to the amazon page with sample content is
which has sample content and links the other links you might want handed to you if you're a slashot wanker.Wolfram is wrong! Einstein is wrong too! And newton also! They're all wrong!
All of the universe can be described as a single atom of plutonium.
http://www.newphys.se/elektromagnum/physics/Ludwig Plutonium/.
Since I was a kid I've wondered about something like this, although my (then) 12-year old way of expressing the question was a lot different (and a lot simpler in scope). What if you wrote a simple program that filled a 1000x1000 pixel matrix of 24-bit RGB values with every possible combination? The program could be short, but really the language is irrelevant, as you could design a special language with one argumentless 'instruction' that did only this. (We could start now getting into whether the language's host environment (OS) can be regarded as simply a fancy immediate-mode interpreter, but thats a different topic)
What are the implications? Forget how long it would take or the fact that perhaps 99% of the resulting images would be apparent garbage (could be looking at every square meter of sidewalk on earth), isn't it possible that every conceivable image in the entire universe would eventually get drawn? But how can that be, since although the number of possible combinations (64^1000000) is unfathomably large it is still finite, but isnt the universe (and therefore the subset of the universe that is visible in 24-bit RGB) infinite? Or is it? Every person's face that ever lived, every rock, stone, every animal, evey bacterium, every star, - everything, from every possible angle, would eventually appear.
"Aha", you say, "but at that fixed resolution two grains of sand/two stars/two ashley twins might look identical, pixel-for-pixel!" Right, but remember that all possible distances from each are shown, so if you multiply the zoom by two and tile 4 adjacent 1000^2 pixel zoomed images into a square the differences can be appear; if not, do it again and again until the sufficient resolution is obtained to show the differences.
Now remember my 1000x1000 grid is arbitrary, you can use a 10x10 grid if you like, and in fact that makes this more troublesome because the pace is much smaller: there are vastly fewer 10x10 24 bit images, but the zoom-and-tile method can still be applied - so does this mean the whole universe can be shown in 24^100 tiles? What about a 5x5 grid? 2x2? Help me out here because I'm trying to figure out what's missing in my logic - there's no way the limited number of permutations of 2x2 pixel grids is sufficient to express every image in the universe, but by zooming and tiling it seems like its possible. Or not?
Rob Cebollero (using an old account since I am not near my usual machine)
- Opinions subject to change without notice. -RC
The Journal Nature ran an article on this book, mainly on the reactions its getting (both good and bad):
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/Ah, but while Perl is a nice language, it isn't purely functional.
I don't think anyone in their right mind would ever claim that Perl is a functional language. Did I miss something? It's probably better described as a procedural language with some OOP sledgehammered in.
No, Haskell is the only real choice here.
Now THAT'S ass-talking! What about Lisp, Scheme, ML, etc?
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
He's just trying to sell more copies of Mathematica!
That's not it. Wolfram is saying the exact opposite. He is saying the universe uses very little math. Just a few simple rules. Fancy math is a red herring, in my opinion. It explains nothing. On the contrary, it is our equations that are in dire need of an explanation, from Newton's gravity equation to Einstein's GR/SR equations. They only describe the evolution of matter but do not explain the causal mechanisms.
Real science is about causal mechanisms at the fundamental level where simple rules rule! This is where Wolfram's ideas are revolutionary. They will not be well received in academic circles. Academics hate simplicity because they can't show off with it.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
This should be the focus of his book, if indeed he has such a theorem, not, I repeat, not, on how many lines the universe can be encoded in, nor on how complexity can arise from simple equations. Because these are already old news. Richard Feynman, in his famed Lecture Notes (which everyone here should read) Volume II, expressed these ideas most succintly in his discussion of Taylor-Couette flow. I'll leave it to you to read up on this bit...
So, to summarize, the title of this
Didn't Einstein say something like, "God does not play Perl with the Universe."
some of you seem to be taking the "4 lines of code" thing a bit too literally...
it's only a bloody analogy.
the core meaning is a rule or command that just IS, and if it ever does get "discovered", it'll probably be as an abstract idea that takes a lot of dedication to realise yourself... in the way that "divine truths" are apparently discovered through meditation and other activities..
maybe it was already discovered by buddhists reaching nirvana
blah
and stop all the 42s!! it lost its comedy value on the 2nd mention!
m33p m33p
Well, we start with a differential equation, in particular, a partial different equation (pde): A pde is an equation that describes how a quantity changes with respect to several variables (which we will take to be time and space). Imagine when someone farts in a corner of a room. We want to describe how the concentration of farted gas (the quantity we are interested in) changes when time advances, as well as how the concentration of farted gas changes with space. Using molecular dynamics arguments, we can write down an equation
dc/dt = D (d^2c/dx^2 + d^2c/dy^2 + d^2c/dz^2)
where c is the concentration of farted gas, and t represents time and (x,y,z) represent three-dimensional space. The actual form of the equation is not important (but it is the diffusion equation in case you are interested). The point to note here is that we have written down a pde for c as a function of t and (x,y,z). We can then proceed to solve for c at any t and (x,y,z) that we are interested in, using techniques from calculus. This, in a nutshell, is the basis of many equations of physics -- Newton's, Maxwell's, Schrodinger's, and Einstein's equations are all pde's.
Now, imagine a discretized version of a pde, in which time t, space (x,y,z), and the quantity itself c, are all discretized. Discretized in the sense that they take discrete values, i.e., we measure time in "time steps" t=1,2,3,etc. and space in "space units" x=1,2,3,etc. and the quantity c in, for example, "smelly", "moderate", "not too smelly", etc. Then the discretized version of a pde is a cellular automaton.
By considering only two dimensions (one time and one space), and by explicitly enumerating all possible rules that one can get, Wolfram found that there are several automata that cen generate extermely complicated behavior.
Now, what his book seem to be proposing is that, by moving away from the calculus of a pde, and venture instead into discrete space, he seems to have uncovered a profund law governing all cellular automata. This in itself is a cool result! However, add that to his belief that everything (including the universe) is a cellular automaton, and people get less enthusiastic. Anways, hope this brief treatise on cellular automata helps!
My first college physics professor used to say that Maxwell's 4 equations do a nice job of summing up the Universe...
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
People interested in the concept of the universe
as a digital computer should look at
http://www.digitalphilosophy.org.
Fredkin was thinking about this stuff long before Wolfram was born.
OK, if what he is proposing simplicity, why is his book over 1,000 pages?
if (person.slashdotUserName == 'naasking') { person.screwOver(); }
:-)
Funny haha, not funny heehee...
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
hhgttg: "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the universe is and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another which states that this has already happened".
So I guess that since he will be finding the code of the universe, we will soon vanish in a puff of logic and be replaced by something else
my sig
LET
THERE
BE
LIGHT.
And here's some lowercase to shut up the damned lameness filter.
The concept is deceptively simple. Every interaction in the universe can be reduced to a series of mathmatical equations of iteration that can be represented in two dimensional space. The clustering of solution follow extrememly simple rules, that even a child could learn in a few minutes. The reprocussions if this is proven to be true would be nothing short of revolutionary. Imagine the paradigm shift when the world finally realized that the earth revolved around the sun... this beats that by a factor of 100.
;-)
And he's got lots of hard data to back up his claim. Sampling from dozens of sciences, he shows the same patterns emerging over and over again. It's stunning to see some of the work because it becomes intuative after only a few examles and you can see the patterns in so many different places.
So either he's a complete nut, who has taken something that's absurdely simple and mis-applied it to all the major scientific endeavours, or he's a certifiable genius who has just opened the window to understand the universe in the most basic of ways.
I'll let you know after I read the book.
make world
It could also be done in 6 lines of very readable Python code. *ducks*
I read the article and I understand that it's only a brief summary of the book's theme, but there seemed to be a quite obvious omission in the underlying nature of his theory. Wolfram postulates an algorithm for existance (ie-creation code), but then doesn't explain what this is compiled with?
Even if, for example, this code comes into activation at the beginning of a big-bang, what underlying (pre-existing) energy force is being compiled through this algorithm to create creation? My only guess is potential energy. In my understanding, potential energy is the only existential absolute. When you think about it, even when we apply the word 'nothing' in the English language, there is always a potential for that state to be changed into a something - ie. For anything to have come into existance in the first place (even black holes), there has to be the potential for it to exist. In other words, potential energy permeates everything and is the underlying force behind all that is.
It's also undefinable and innately mysterious.
I think the greatest issue confronting science is that it is limited from the outset to observation and experimentation, when that's only half of the equation. Existance comprises of both creation and that which brings about creation - potential energy/God/Brahma. Hopefully Stephen Wolfram's book will push the envelope of conventional scientific understanding by attempting to unite the two into a unified cosmology.
-
Postulate 1: Knowledge is power
-
Postulate 2: Time is money
-
As every engineer knows, Power = Work/Time
-
Since: Knowledge = Power and Time = Money, then: Knowledge = Work/Money
-
Solving for Money, we get:
-
Money = Work/Knowledge
-
Thus, as knowledge approaches zero, money approaches infinity regardless of work done.
-
Conclusion: The less you know, the more you make (but then you probably knew that already).
There is this addendum"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Isn't this a fallacy of undistributed middle term:
Simple iterative functions produce complex structure.
The Universe has instances of similar complex structure.
Therefore the complex structure observed in the universe is modeled by simple iterative functions.
Wolfram's first CA book (the collection of his papers) is out of print but available for download at http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/books/c a-reprint/
That explains why the world is so F'd up: he couldn't read it six months later to debug it
:-p
Table-ized A.I.
and an egomaniac. I went to school (in the 80's) with a guy that worked at WR for many years. He told story after story of how nutty Wolfram was.
WR is private, and he apparently owned a very large % of it (the implication being he was very stingy with stock options). That sorta backs up the "egomaniac" part.
Not to mention, that the whole 42 thing is way overdone and stopped being funny many years ago.
Four lines for Wolfram.
Really, the universe is
a three-line haiku.
The idea that there's an underlying structure to the universe that's executing on some finite-state machine has come up a few times. It's a reasonable conjecture. But until somebody finds a program, automaton, or a set of rules that yields physics, it's no more than a conjecture. If somebody finds such a set of rules, they get a Nobel Prize and go down in history with Newton and Einstein. But neither Fredkin nor Wolfram have done that.
The article says that the book has in it a way to violate the second law of thermodynamics (or at least that the author claims such.)
:) )
Uh, any confirmations on this? I mean if it IS true wouldn't that alone be like one of the biggest contributions so science, err, well, uh, ever? Heh.
(or at least it would cut down my power bill.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
s''$/=\2048;while(){G=29;R=142;if((@a=unqT="C*",_) [20]_=unqb24,qT,@_ ; =73;O=$b[4]>8^(P=(E=255)>12^Q>>4^Q/8^Q ))>8^(E>14=8e val
b=map{ord qB8,unqb8,qT,_^$a[--D]}@INC;s/...$/1$Q=unqV,qb25,
)+=P+(~Fs/[D-HO-U_]/\$$s/q/pack+/g;
In one of the articles on him, I read about him pointing out this seashell, and how it closely resembled one of his automata. Well, duh. How else would cells organize themselves? They don't line up in neat grids, and they move around sometimes, but of course the growth (and practically everything else) of cellular organisms will be closely related to cellular automata.
I don't think anyone has been disputing that.
Could the basic building blocks of the universe be modeled this way? Maybe. But it's not going to matter. The universe we see and measure would be emergent properties, anyway, and it's pretty well established that perfect measurement is impossible.
The problem with cellular automata is that they're hard to approximate. You can't predict the general behavior of a million-square game of Life with a thousand grey squares.
You could have your model of the universe in 4 lines of code, and not be able do a damn thing with it. A finite system can't contain a copy of itself (let alone one running at a higher speed) in one corner. So we could neither confirm such a model nor apply it.
I'm sure of only one practical application of this admittedly revolutionary development of cellular automata: this is going to form the foundations of some terrific computer games. I want a copy of that book. It's no 42, but I'm sure it's awfully interesting anyway.
#!/usr/bin/perl
my $answer;
$answer = 6 * 4;
print $answer;
$./universe
42
$
Wolframm seems more interested in selling the book than actually submitting any scientific papers to the mathematical world.
... is the answer "42" by any chance ?
Is it open source? if it can be recreated or used can the mpaa or riaa take it copywright it and sue everyone for breaching the dcma?
..
heh
The book
a ms/
http://www.wolframscience.com/
The downloadable code (4 lines, I suppose)
http://www.wolframscience.com/nks/progr
Stephen Wolfram
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/about-sw/
Let
There
Be
Light
soul daddies in a firewire tumble dryer
So Wolfram cannot find those 4 lines, because the universe will instantly change to a new algorithm. "Oh!" said Wolfram and vanished in a puff of facetiousness.
======
In X-Windows the client serves YOU!
Heheheh... Mod parent up ^__^ Oh, wait. Religion on slashdot? Better hang on to that score of "1" for a while.
But I am also wondering how long one of these 4 lines of code are? 80 characters per line? Are these strait equations? It occurs to me the answer itself was either purposely vague or just plain obscure (genius and fools can be). I thought it was 42, personally.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Whether or not the previous poster knew what he was talking about, the fact is that the Four-Color Theorem has been rigorously proven. The problem with the proof is that a computer was used to check a great (finite) number of cases that were found using traditional mathematics. The general case was logically reduced to a large, finite number of special cases and then checked by computer, since to check by hand would be unwieldy.
Seeing as computers are basically big, fast logic engines, this is a reasonable use, so long as the cases checked were finite in number, and were arrived at by sound mathematics. The paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal, and has been accepted by the mathematical community, so it certainly should be accepted by you.
In the future, you probably shouldn't go accusing fellow geeks of ignorance of basic concepts (like mathematical proof). It's just rude. ;-)
Aren't you dead?
...is better 8)
Of course, the guy knows a lot more than I probably ever will about mathematics, but does anyone else get the feeling that he's bypassed any normal method of peer evaluation in order to claim credit himself?
... and what's the big deal? All he says is that the universe "might" be able to be represented in four lines of code. Wasn't Mandelbrot doing this 30 years ago?
If he had published some formulas, I'd be impressed. For now, it seems hyped. Anyone read the book already?
In the interview/article, the interviewer states that Wolfram created some language called SMP. Was this an actual program, or is the interviewer/reviewer trying to talking about Symmetric Multi Processing? Wolram comes off sounding like a complete jackass sometimes in this article.
...and this lie crawls out of its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.'
That explains why the world is so F'd up: he couldn't read it six months later to debug it
It'd be much better if he's doing it in Java, and we'll have longer day too!
Or a shorter one-liner in Ruby.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
Suppose the universe could be represented in 4 lines of code, in a universal computing machine which is turing complete.
There are many physical processes which are completely random. If you begin with exactly the same situation, it will have different outcomes.
These include:
Decay of radioactive nuclei
Diffraction of light
These processes have been observed to the smallest levels possible, by many many scientists and found to be completely stochastic (i.e random, unpredictable).
How is code in an universal machine going to produce random behaviour?
It can't.
Wolfram must be a very arrogant, and, I believe, very *wrong* man to think that he could do better than centuries of scientists.
Until he starts predicting important events, which is the whole *point* of science, not writing huge books for 49.95, he should stop distracting people from real science.
repeat {
lather();
rinse();
}
Martix 4.
matrix 4.
Taco's contagious chronic misspelling syndrome just turned into an epidemic!!
for(1) { everything = God(creation); }
It could be broken out into many more lines, but it's pretty much just one line. Too bad science will always be just an approximation. It's like trying to define a curve using dots. Just note the parameters of the curve. Hell, just say: there's a curve. Don't bother with approximate measurements.
I read about it in a local newspaper and wrote a small simulator (in two hours) drawing results from random input data. It has Gtk+ "GUI".
You can find it at http://uworld.dyndns.org/linux/wolfram.c
I just need to rectify the two constants:
"God is love" and "Shit happens"
Sorry, I should have worded that more carefully - but it was past 3 o'clock in the morning when I wrote it =)
What I meant, of course, was that the universe possibly couldn't be expressed with anything other than a functional language - which Perl isn't, even when it's otherwise an outstanding and practical language.
Lisp or Scheme? Bah! "God doesn't play with parentheses..."
=)
"Not only does God play with parentheses, he also plays with parentheses where they are optional."
For one, Wolfram is lobbing a mind-grenade at the ivory-tower sciences. For years, interdisciplinary communication has been neglected, with each discipline thinking that their area is "unique" or "special" somehow. His idea that "it's all much simpler than that" flies in the face of those who want to believe that their "specialized" knowledge is more unique, or valuable, than oh, a general algorithm. This will offend most scientists, who want to think that, say, astrophysics is more complex than sociology (and vice versa).
Human pride in their past achievements stifles much of new human achievement, and the proponents of major achievements were usually whackos at the time (Galileo, Copernicus, Einstein, Nash, Darwin) who questioned legions of prior thought with much simpler explanations. Ockham's razor indicates that four lines are much more likely than an infinitely complex universe, but, in the meantime, millions of scientists are working on finding more complexity, not simplifying.
He (Wolfram) also directly challenges some other older, widely held, beliefs in science, such as a "wet lab" (say, using human cells) cannot be replaced by a simulation. I find it amusing (as a computer professional), as it is akin to saying that an "actual accountant cannot be replaced by a spreadsheet" (or even a that a car mechanic cannot be replaced by a 'bot).
Many accountants grinding numbers were replaced by automations, but the design components, the accounting concepts, were still writing the code. In short, old school scientists looking for lots of "underlying algorithms" would lose job security if their discoveries were simply macros from another field, and their lab was reduced to replication of old data, rather than new discovery.
After reading both Science and Nature for many years, it starts as funny when you first see this actually happening, and then becomes pathetic.... when it takes 8 years for two fields to use the same two line algo's to describe a behavior (say, CA and Planetary formation). The current scientific mindset does not lead to a social scientist browsing physics journals or vice versa, for some reason, they seem to think that some things in the Universe are unrelated to other things in the universe (maybe the "Uni" part is ill-explained to scientists in training?)
Another notion he questions is the concept of "free-will", which has been an underpinning of western civilization since, well, western civilization. Not because it's a well proven, logical concept, but because the very concept of "self" and "identity" hinge on the ideas that somehow, a person is in control. People won't like this, as they'd rather be the master over a machine than a meat-machine. In bio-ethics, there's an entire war over using or changing out the machine components, hinging on a religious belief that there is a "soul", or something similar, that makes a meat-machine unique. If we are all four lines of code, or even 50000, we are much less "special" or "unique", we are not free will but a product of a program.
For all of those tired 42 jokes on this page, maybe I missed the point, maybe they did, I dunno. The entire 42 theme was that humanity, the planet earth, was just code. That any sufficiently complex system may have underlying simple questions, and simple answers. What those who didn't read the Adams books, it goes like this: The earth is just a computing device to give an answer in the form of a question. Nothing more. Tell this to religious authorities, goverment authorities, those who believe in a value of "will" or "life" and they will recoil. The meta code is a bit like two lines: // I forget the limit
initialize $earth;
sleep ($limit);
print question_of_meaning($earth);
With a runtime of many years, and millions of sub variables ($beer_sip_counter and so on), but a simple code starting base (as compared to the derivative results). This is no biggie, it's a self-modifying codebase ($earth varies itself). The premise that the entire universe could be a self-modifying codebase, however, flies in the face of those who want to find the static question, or a static answer. In a self-modifying codebase, both could change. Those who want a concept of "god" want something else messing with variables, those who want "meaning" want something that provides the meat-machine with meaning... and so on.
Just going this far, I know why it took him ten years. Years of self-editing to modify the above, etc.
Anyways, my four lines for a multiverse, in metacode:
while ($existance) { matter = matter;
//int is for folks who need to declare things often, like gods!
define function multiverse ( rand(multiverse));
multiverse ($earth); }
Indeed...
printf("Hahahahaha!%i",13);
Syntactically significant whitespace makes baby Jesus cry.
Atheism leads to nihilism, at least in my thoughts.
Without the stability afforded by the idea of a meaning to life, why not just go on a Natural Born Killers-style rampage? Given that I will just
what is the difference between a good poem and the blood of a few thousand innocents on my hands? People behave as if they believe life has some meaning, for all they may categorically deny any meaning.
Thus, these atheistic arguments make me yawn.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Is the universe in NP?
I wrote several 40-000 lines FORTRAN and C
programs to solve physical problems (the
equivalent of Mathematica...) and at the
end, it was enough to type :
./a.out
to get the answer about my particular problem...
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
Meaning? What is the meaning of love por example? And what is the meaning of peace? And of friendship (i think this is what you meant by relationship)?
You want an accurate meaning of a subjective term (ie: nobody agrees on what those words encompass)?
unfinished: (adj.)
maybe Wolfram is wrong (and he's not the first one to be seduced by CAs, maybe only just because it's faster to iterate CAs than solving nonlinear coupled PDEs), but I feel physics of our time being in the same status as it was in 1894, just before Xrays, radioactivity,quanta, relativity, electrons, and so on. We are just humming along established equations,and the lack of interesting new theories or even applications (A,H bombs, rockets and computers are from the 40-50's) there is a general disinterest of the public and the ypung for the sciences excepted for biology.
Maybe wakeup calls like this one are needed, even if Wolfram ends up only being a millonaire crackpot. I just ordered the book however because the pictures are said to be beautiful, and I lack artbooks...
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
If rules of reasoning can be expressed by 2D cellular automata, then can mathematics, language and logic, then our understanding of the universe based on the traditional PDEs of physics...even if these can not be solved excepted in textbook conditions and usually lead to chaotic behavior.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
I think you mean:
printf("Hahahahaha!%c",13);
Also, check the man page for ascii. 13 is '\r', 10 is '\n'. Please try harder next time.
It exists for the while.
and I said it.
There you go, I ve postulated the universe, in english and in two lines!! Wooah! -- Your friendly neighbourhood-- BOZO
Your poetry's bad.
"Haiku" - three syllables.
You suck, idiot.
>the universe can be represented in 4 lines of mathematica code
hmmm
given that mathematica has a limited set of symbols and operators, s
and given that a line of code in mathematica has a limited number n of symbols and operators,
we get
universe = 4 * s * n
It should be trival though computationally intense to generate every single legal 4 line-combination of symbols and operators
after pruning of these which lead to 'impossible' universes, we are left with a pool of several squillion[technical term] 4 line possiblities.
checking these may take a little longer.
A bonus is of course, in that pool, there are also the 4-line codes for every single possible alternative universe and alternative realities.
another thought is that since these 4-lines of code set up a logical construct that contains the universe (presumably 'complete') that also contains these 4 lines of code, this may well violate Godel's incompleteness theorems.
Of course this might be the same as the possible exemption to the laws of thermodynamics apprently found by Wolfram.
I'm no mathematical genius, I even have problems adding, so I will leave it there.
So you are implying that atheist doesn't get anything out of reading poems?
My physics is a little rusty, but I think that, because of Planck's constant, it should be possible to divide time into discrete intervals. Also, fundamental (and I mean fundamental) particles never change state, or have any sort of internal spin or other properties, they are absolute and unchanging, so all we have to consider is where they're located. Physicists have grouped all interactions (that change the location of particles by applying force) down into four types: gravitational, electro-magnetic, strong and weak forces. Since there are no interactions that do not fall into these groups, and a particle can only interact with another particle, three loops should do it:
while($time++) {
for @particles as $particle_1 {
for @particles as $particle_2 {
$particle->old_location =$particle->location;
$particle_1->location=a vg(
gravitational( $particle_1->location, $particle_2->old_location),
electromagneti c($particle_1->location, $particle_2->old_location),
strongforce($p article_1->location, $particle_2->old_location),
weakforce($par ticle_1->location, $particle_2->old_location));
}
}
}
Anything that happens is basically a series of interactions that are all made up of those above.
For example, the gravitational force exerted on a ball by the earth is simply the sum of all the forces of every particle of the earth with every particle of the ball. I suppose the easier way to look at it would be from a threading-perspective where each particle gets its own thread, and moves itself relative to every other particle in the universe (in which case you'd onl y need two for loops).
The reason the univsere seems complicated is because we're too busy looking at abstractions. At a fundamental level, of course, everything is very simple. If you're interested in discussing this, please email me:
Cody (codythefreak@hotmail.com)
... he's probably using KDE instead of Gnome.
Dirty Linux hippie.
I haven't read the book (already ordered it), but I have a bone to pick with it. The first thing that is new about it is that it avoids peer review prior to publication.
We all know that the best way to advance in an area of knowledge is by getting criticism to our new ideas. The reason to do so before publication is that any scientists know how easy it is to fool one self and tries to avoid it, not by asking a few friends to read our stuff, but by asking the biggest experts in the best magazines (or by posting for free in a web site so everybody gets a crack at it).
By failing to follow this procedure Dr. Wolfram has open himself up to criticism that his book is not a scientific enterprise, but a commercial one...
Disclosure: I am a mathematician...
I haven't read Wolfram's book, but you should try reading:
The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants
by Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, Aristid Lindenmayer
before saying that he's hit on something completely new and original here. At the very least, you can check the book out of a library and look at the amazing pictures of lifelike plants, generated from these simple systems (L-Systems, named after the author "lindenmayer").
"The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum does not vary."
Meaning is an illusion. All things are meaningless.
The assignment of meaning is arbitrary, meaning only occurs in the mind of the observer. Hence, no one will ever find "the meaning of it all" with sufficient rigor to satisfy anyone but themselves.
But every time you try to leave your house, you get a Security Violation
S.L. "So do you believe we'll find this code in your lifetime?"
S.W. "I hope so. Yeah."
:) Meaning if you are looking for the code, it ain't there.
Aparently Steven Wolfram is no Neo.
S. W.s error?:
So put on your Neo Glasses and know:
S.L./W. - Not only does a single measly rule account for everything, but if one day we actually see the rule, he predicts, we'll probably find it unimpressive. "One might expect," he writes, "that in the end there would be nothing special about the rule for our universe - just as there has turned out to be nothing special about our position in the solar system or the galaxy."
Hmmm, a recent slashdot linked to article on the possible changing nature of the laws of physics? seems to suggest that what exist in existance is changeable.
Ok existance exist, but what's in it can change, just like consciousness either exist or not but what exist in consciousness is changeable.
Are consciousness and existance related?
EQUATIONS:
Conversion / Translation
E = MC - EINSTEIN
E = Energy, M = Matter, C = Speed of Light Squared.
T1 = T2 k - SPINOZA
T1 = non-mystical thought, T2 = things in physical reality, k = the active constant.
T1 ( I + E ) = v T2 (k) - Di SILVESTRO
I = degree of Intent, E = degree of Effort, v = velocity of conversion.
Einstein searched until the moment he died for the equation of the "Unified Field Theory". He never realized the missing element was the same element that caused so much of his life to be what it was. From the cheers and recognition from supporters of his work to the threats on his life, exile out of his country and destruction of publications on his work. All this caused from the element Einstein was exercising, but not realizing, the element of consciousness. It was Einsteins' conscious efforts that lead him to produced his work. The consciousness of those who recognized his work and put forth the effort to honor him for it. The conscious efforts of some to create an illusion, leading many into action of threat, destruction and force to have a physical impact on Einstein and many others. And it was the conscious efforts to apply Einsteins' work that contributed to creating the physical power that removed the force which cause Einstein to leave his country. Perhaps Einstein did come to intimately know what the missing element was, in those last few moments of his life.
The Spinoza equation "T1 = T2 k" expresses two perspectives: All things in physical reality can be comprehended/translated into conscious thought and conscious thought can be converted/translated into physical reality. For those who have doubt about the validity of this equation: Look around and note all the physical things you perceive. Then determine, to the best of your ability, what exist as a result of conscious comprehension of physical reality and conscious directed action, effort and intent to apply physical movement to create? In other words: What do you see that originated in conscious imagination?
For those still in doubt: What don't you perceive, but know by what you do perceive, that there must exist both the conscious ability to comprehend physical reality and conscious imagination to cause intentional control of physical reality? (i.e. Computer usage and its internal operations. Software and it's existence on magnetic media. Disease identification and treatment or cure. Radio wave creation used in sending and receiving data, and its' translation to and from what we can perceive - music, pictures of stars we cannot see from earth but now know they exist. The life we create via genetic control and duplication, etc..)
If you really think your "Exactly" + sig is so important that those filtering for highly-rated comments ought to read it...
...well, then you're arrogant, stupid, or both.
Get with the program. Use your bonus wisely, or prepare to be modded down and generally reviled.
exactly. the reason why each of these cases required so much computer power, is because many graph theory proofs require exhaustive manipulation of abstracts such as vertices / edges / regions and in this case the coloring, X(G). the cases not only are exhaustive but most importantly categorize a graph into different types. Each of these types has a proof associated with it that makes the case valid. I am assuming that the cases are fairly similar because otherwise a computer could not prove them. Due to their similarity, the computer can grind away and prove all the somewhat similar but somewhat differing cases one by one.
QED
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
8x7=42
void main(void)
{ *((int *) 0++) = 0/0;
};
As you can see, the whole existance is undefined and required exception handling.
The best part is the towards the end where it turns out he's been imagining his best friend. Jennifer Connelly is real hot, too.
Best Windows Freeware
god is not that dirty.
If you are desperate for reading the book and just can't stand until it's in your bookstore, try amazon. They have _122_ sample pages. This should be enough for the beginning.
An algorithm is a pure expression of process; it has no meaning with execution and data contexts. Thus, I think Wolfram has gone beyond science into faith and religion... he may answer "how", but that is only part of an entire description of the universe that also asks "why" and "what."
Be that as it may, I am fond of heretics who shake the foundations of science with unorthodoxy. Wolfram is brilliant, if erratic, and I'll read his book simply to have my viewpoints challenged.
All about me
10 CLS 20 PRINT "I KNOW EVERYTHING "; 30 PRINT " -- NO REALLY -- "; 40 GOTO 20
that probably explains why noone really understand the universe then...
I am amazed at the degree to which people here at Slashdot and elsewhere (e.g., Kuroshin) seem to be oblivious to the fact that Wolfram is largely taking credit for other people's work. This is not entirely true, as there are posts that seem to reflect an understanding of this. However, there have been way too many posts declaring either:
(1) I don't know much about Wolfram, but he must be a smart guy! Look, he wrote Mathematica! Mathematica is cool!
(2) I don't know much about Wolfram, but what his book seems to be saying is cool! We need to give it the benefit of the doubt.
(3) I have an unspoken goal to identify the next genius of the century. I am obssessed with this, and Wolfram seems like a good candidate. I will make myself look good by demonstrating that I understand who the next genius is when everybody else doesn't understand. That makes me almost as smart as him.
Look, Wolfram is a smart guy. But not THAT smart. As pointed out by others, he has a tendency to take credit for way too many things already established by others. Mathematica is a great program, for example. But MATLAB is probably more efficient, and there are numerous, similar programs, such as Maple or S out there. And complexity theory is not a "new kind of science" as Wolfram would have you believe. It's been around for some time, as others have pointed out, in the form of chaos theory, fractals, self-organizing systems, etc.
I'm just astounded at the extent to which Wolfram has gotten away with taking credit for an entire field, especially on sites such as Slashdot or Kuroshin, where people are generally extremely technologically literate.
Any equation that is more complicated than the systyem it is describing is worthless.
Seems to me that the universe should only be contained on one line of code.
A *real* god would do it in but a single line of Perl.
Not Perl -- APL.
Quis metamoderunt ipses metamoderatores?
Wolfram's work does not appear to be new.
In fact, far from it.
It sounds from here like it's largely a retelling of some work done in the past, without credit. CA are not new, certainly in biology using Monte Carlo techniques and cellular automata has been a major research focus for a while. The pretention of making the suggestion that all this stems from Wolfram's work is just incredible. I can't get over it - for crying out loud, I did my thesis on this stuff, and a lot of people I know are using similar techniques in all sorts of other fields already.
Let's get this into perspective, okay? This is not a new branch of mathematics, unless there's something in Wolfram's books that nobody has mentioned yet. Other people have laid the foundations for this stuff; Wolfram is nobody very important (okay, good mathematician, but I think he needs some education in the difference between 'models that give acceptably good approximation' and 'reality'). If he's got all these amazing abilities, I'd hope he'd have used them to solve some of the really hard problems (eg. most fields of physics) out there, where we could actually go through a real research process, see if his work stands up to real life, etc.
Thank You.
This is silly. The universe is far too simple to be explained by mathematics
Actually the book has more to do with cellular automatons than with mathematics,
although, arguably, you could describe cellular automatons using link theory (which is a theory of structure, logic and math, and Wolfram's automatons are specially well suited for it) and with more classic mathematical tools.
Here is my little biased review (biased because I have a take in that kind of stuff, only more mind related).
I wont reiterate the claims of the book because you can find all sorts of review that do that (oh wait, now that I reread this it appears I'm doing just that later, oh well, still not bad an intro, heh), suffice to say, this book could become the "Bible of Reductionism" for many generations of scientists to come. I do not use the word Bible trivially here, this book is about belief, and that is the biggest problem anybody will have with it. You can agree or disagree with Wolfram as to wether or not the boradness of his conclusions will hold up to scrutiny, but the transfer of those conclusions to to the real world is a completely different step. It is a matter of belief.
If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to almost anything. (Fred Menger, Emory University Organic Chemist)
Nobody is immune to this mistake, a good part of the field of artificial intelligence research is faulty of the same (I myself do it often, but I don't publish), it is the reason why connectionism as a paradigm was so succesful among the community even if it still has to deliver on some of its most basic promises.
In a nutshell, Wolfram found a set of simple rules for cellular automatons that lead to complex behavior. The second part of his discovery is the principle of computational equivalence, again, summed up, it means that passed a 'threshold' (more or less), two computational processes can be regarded as equally complex. This is a BIG claim, one that will be investigated thoroughly by mathematicians. But the point is that if it holds, you have explained many things : randomess, free will, and you have put in terms that are all but vague what it means for connectionism to cross the threshold of self awareness (in a broad sense).
How, you aks, can he do that with cellular automatons ? Simple once you drop the concept of linear time. What he realized along with many other researchers (and I'll grab the opportunity to pat myself in the back and include myself in that group), is that time is a poorly defined concept today, until you dive into quantum physics when it starts to make sense. What is needed is to redefine causality. Again in a nutshell, classical causality says that an effect always follows a cause, but that is a definition that itself includes time, and since causality is supposed to define the arrow of time, this definition is not acceptable.
The new definition becomes "an effect always has a cause", now you can immediately see that the idea of causal directionality has been removed, but that doesnt mean that time flows backward, just like things didnt start falling up once Newton realized up and down were foolih concepts. Shortly put both future and past exert constraints on a local event (think about Marov states in the future and in the past). When equally balanced, those consraints map to classical quantum physics.
So Wolfram's cellular automatons integrate that concept, you can link events to cells that are in the same discrete time slice as your event. You can link to events in the past, or (like in classical physics), link to events in the future. That itself assumes that time is a discrete phenomenon, it is again a BIG assumption, it is a statement of Wolfram's belief (he uses that word) that time in the physical universe IS indeed discrete, and that thus, his discoveries about causal networks map directly to our world. Lets make it clear here that if he is wrong, then none of these claims map to the physical universe, and the book is just about having fun (a lot of it, tho) with computers and the concept of time (now of course that in itself could be very useful for quantum computing).
And then he goes on to describe how you can then use this stuff to make elemetary particles, or even space-time itself.
All in all this is genius stuff, if not completely revolutionary. I would describe it as the Game of Life meets Link Theory. It is a brilliant reformulation of Link Theory in terms of cellular automatons, and since Link Theory is a bit hard to work on, an easy way to use it with computers is extremely welcomed. For my part, I cannot wait for a version of Mathematica that integrates non-linear time processes. My own neural net models would become that much easy to write as I wouldn't have to deal with C++ journaling memory templates, and once quantum computers are out, I can just run the thing and not wait an arbitrary long time.
But again the flaw is one that we often make, if usually not that publicly: we start to believe in our stuff. Yes, it could work that way, but everything here is the result of a computer experiment, and that is the hard truth of it. It is a beautiful theory, easy to understand, even for the non scientist, but its predictions are minimal, distinguishing it from a physical model of reality in order to test it is going to be a hard task.
Arguably connectionism's biggest problem is that its promises are quite vague, and thus, it is hardly disprovable as a paradigm, and the same problem applies to Wolfram's work, it is very apealing, but things are explained in very tiny details or in broad strokes. There is no equation that will tell you the bigger picture because there is no bigger picture, the world is a soup of events, and as apealing as this might be, as natural as the patterns the simulation generated seems to be, this does not mean that the physical world is actually operating like this.
Even going further, it is worthless as a replacement for 'bigger laws', laws that supervene other laws, gaz propagation can be predicted by such laws, but Wolfram's laws are too tiny, their nature is to lead to chaos and non predictibility, to actually generate the supervenient laws, but again, predictive power is non existant or lower than current science.
But again, this will not prevent many from holding this book quasi religiously, even unknowingly (as many people do today with broad connectionism), because it is simple, elegant, and accounts for a lot, or so it seems (but again, some people think that the pyramids were built by aliens because they think it's simple, elegant, and explains a lot). This book will be about belief, in the next decades and centuries, it will be held as the Bible of Reductionism, because it provides the self consistent argument some philosophers like Dennett needed to explain away consciousness as a pure illusion.
This is my second problem with this book, Wolfram basically says he is presenting us with a theory of everything, but there is not much about perception, qualias, and more generally, the phenomenal aspects of consciousness. Wolfram, as the Priest of Reductionists I think he is going to become, simply leaves the matter out, talking about perception in terms of representational spaces (even if not in quite those terms), but the phenomenal aspect of those spaces is let out, as if we actually were Chalmers' zombies.
To conclude, this will be a delightful read for most slashdoters, at least, all of those with a scientific 'way of life' (no strong backround needed), they will see it as the crystalization of their materialistic views. Religious people might have a problem with this book as it depicts us as automatons, literally.
And then there are people like me, lost between the duality of phenomena and matter and the universe being-causally-closed-sad-state-of-affair. To us, sometimes known as naturalistic dualists (qualia as part of natural laws), the strong deterministic framework that Wolfram imposes seems to point to a strong epiphenomenalism for consciousness, where other theories based on quantum indeterminacy (and quantum theory has been throughly tested for 60+ years) do open possibilities of weak epiphenomenalism. In a few words, I'm not completely convinced by Wolfram's version of free will.
I'm a bit more than two third into the book, reading it quickly at first to grasp the feel of it, and then to read it slowly a second time, so it is possible that some of the things I have said may not be fair, and for this I apologize in advance.
I'm loving every part of it, and if you feel my remarks are too harsh, just assume that I'm jealous I didn't write it. If anything this will make mentioning reverse causation much easier in academia without being laughed at, and Link Theory is going to get a huge boost. Having made 4 computer languages already, I plan to have my fifth be able to run reverse causation in typical link theory problems or simulate my causal backpropagation neural network model. If I can use some of Wolfram's formalism to help this task and if he has cleared up the mess with causality, or helped people make the distinction between predictability and determinism for the rest of us too, then I'll be eternally grateful.
lone, dfx.
http://www.causaergsum.net/
PERL is twisted and backwards. The real solution is REPL:
(loop (print (eval (read))))
Those who do not know the past are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.
in the Four Noble Truths. Does anyone know if this is GPL-ed?
Inventor of the LOLbalrog meme.
I recall studying that when the origin of planetary motion that we saw in the sky was first questioned, they assumed that the earth was stationary and all revolved around it. but the motion they saw in the sky was strange were that actually the case (the earth being the center and not moving) - so they claimed that the other planents were moving in multiple figure eights and there were sub loops at points and such.
they "proved" it all with complicated formulas and diagrams and it was considered to be what was good and true.
then it was shown that what they were looking at was an epiphenomena of the underlying truth - and that truth was far simpler. which seems to be a theme in science, the simple rule is usually the right one.
so to me, I am certainly curious if he is onto something in that there are simpler rules out there that govern it all.
it is similar to the planetary motion concept in that it doesn't give us as much self importance in it all.
it also reminds me of Rodeny Barnes' (sp?) work that was covered in "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control" - where he designed small robots to effectively have ractive nervous systems like those of an insect and he showed that they could then react much in the way of something having conscious thought - but they were just reacting to stimulus in a rule based fashion.
same with large neural nets - there are simple logic rules that are the base and then over time the connections and outcomes of those interactions become more complex.
anyway - this book is on my wishlist at amazon - I look forward to reading it.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Well, equally it's not likely to be 1200 pages of "oh, by the way, complex systems exist" - though I do agree that most of what we're discussing here is stuff which was kinda-sorta controversial ten or fifteen years ago.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
The question raised is, how does an atheist 'get' anything out of anything?
Forget about Perl--it can be done is a single line of BASIC:
10 GOTO 10
That last one is the most problematic. Wolfram says he doesn't expect people to understand him, or to get a negative reaction from the scientific community, and -- worse -- that this negative reaction is only to be expected etc. These are the early hallmarks of the crank.
Things to expect soon: A legion of amateur readers proclaiming him a genius and arguing that the indifferent reaction of mainstream science is somehow evidence that the book is right. Just remember: P(Cranky and Weird | Work of Genius) = High. P(Work of Genius | Cranky and Weird) = Very low.
See here:
& ci d=3365513
http://books.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=30750
This is not a question about whether humans see in 24 bit color. The whole 1st two lines of your reply have nothing to do with the point of my problem, which is about the apparent paradox of containing an infinite set (the unlimited number of 24-bit megapixel images in the universe) in a finite one (24-bit megapixel space).
As for the rest of your reply, expanding the representational space doesnt change the problem of it being finite. It could just as well be 64 bit color or 128bit or 1024bit or something wide enough to contain the whole EMF spectrum or more. Its still finite, but the set it is representing is (apparently) infinite.
Decentralization: the brief interval between the decline of one centralized regime and rise of another.
> It gives an accurate picture of physics, ...relationships, love, peace, etc.
> but not
> Sure it does, in fact logical and mathematical modeling
> of relationships between groups and even between individuals
> is widely used and has been for sometime.
in theory.
If this were true, then mathematicians/physicists/engineers would be better than the average person at:
- romance (aka getting laid)
- salesmanship
- politics
And I think there's ample evidence that they are in fact worse at these.
I think what's going on is more like this: mathematicians are especially bad at empirical testing, and at taking empiracle evidence seriously, therefore they more easily delude themselves into believing that they understand it all. (And this guy Wolfram, professor 'really complicated shit', is leading the pack.)
Marketing-driven companies end up over-marketing their products. Engineering-driven companies end up over-engineering
Bullshit.
If he can write the universe in 4 lines of code
he should be able to make trillions in the stock
market.
Thanks for warning me NOT to buy this piece
of crap.
The first two hundred pages are unsatisfying, and do not live up to any of his claims.
1. Nearly all arguments are highly qualitative--I have grown weary of reading "seems random." For instance, by showing several illustrations, Wolfram makes the argument that with too few rules, a CA behaves "simply"--i.e. eventually forming periodic, uniform, or self-similar structures. But once a critical number of rules have been reached, the CA becomes "complex", i.e. forming "seemingly random" structures, and then claims that for all higher numbers of rules, the complexity is equivalent, because higher numbers of rules yield behavior that seems equivalently random. Perhaps later he will develop a more rigorous justification for what he says, but for now I am very unsatisfied by a new kind of science that "seems" to be true.
2. The first chapter is devoted to telling the reader how incredibly important the book is. In the notes, he claims that modesty gets in the way of clarity, but that is nonsensical--at two hundred pages, I am much more well versed in his claims about the importance of his message than I am in the message itself.
3. There are many large, redundant illustrations. The font size is large. The spacing is large. The first two hundred pages could have been easily made into the first few dozen pages.
4. Wolfram argues that simple programs will (or should, at least) supplant mathematics in science. As of yet, I do not see the difference between mathematics and simple programs. Most universities used to hold computer science as a subdivision of mathematics until the field became too large and demanded its own buildings. There is a reason the two departments used to share the same building.
I do not intend to use the first two hundred pages as any firm judgement of the entirety of the book, especially considering that the latter half of the book contains very dense notes that I have yet to read. However, they have well served to reduce the amount of time per day I intend to spend reading the book.
Perhaps Wolfram is simply not very good at writing beginnings of books.
Jack Durian
> The question raised is, how does an
> atheist 'get' anything out of anything?
Very much, thank you. See reality as it is.
Make your own conclusions from it.
Deduce your own morals.
See the world, instead of having those rose
tinted spectacles forced onto your nose.
So, how do you 'get' anything when all your
understandings are, in fact, only laws from on
high?
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Why? What is wrong with syntactically significant whitespace? I've heard many people say it's so bad, but nobody has ever told me why it's bad, other than that it's different and therefore they don't like it.
Sir, allow me to kick your arse with Erlang!
+1, Funny? I'm serious!
I went to two bookstores in Cambridge today, and both said that they had sold out of it amazingly quickly, and weren't getting more for a while. I wonder if Slashdot had anything to do with this?
Intersting are some numbers:
At a different level, we see it in the human brain itself, which starts with only 12 million bytes of specification in the genome, yet ends up with a complexity that is millions of times greater than its initial specification5. (..) The genome has 6 billion bits, which is 800 million bytes, but there is enormous repetition, e.g., the sequence "ALU" which is repeated 300,000 times. Applying compression to the redundancy, the genome is approximately 23 million bytes compressed, of which about half specifies the brain's starting conditions. The additional complexity (in the mature brain) comes from the use of stochastic (i.e., random within constraints) processes used to initially wire specific areas of the brain, followed by years of self-organization in response to the brain's interaction with its environment.
Thus roughly speaking we start with some kind of 12MB programm working on a 12MB set of input data. Pretty good work that our little cellular automata do, when acting in the physical environment eh?
Seems all he is doing is restating the old Greek idea of the atom in modern fashion.
Nothing new under that sun.
Levy's ad like article is brilliant. Make me want to read the book more. I hope I won't be disappointed. Levy made this book sounds like a Manual of the universe. And perhaps a cookbook that you can follow and produce the whole universe on your computer. Ok, assume you have a superfast one than by the time you read up to here, Adam is kissing Eve in the Garden of Eden.
In the past few years I have read several books on evolutionary computing, or some that touch the complexity theory. It's a tricky subject. Few writers get it right. Many make the subject too philosophical. Where is the beef?
A use of this method might be to put text into your code that descibes what the code does. This way you can infer what the code does, without actually pouring over the code line by line.
I've heard this technique is used by sane programmers. They call it "Commenting Code".
"...and you want me to stick that where?!"
I don't know about you guys, but the way I was brought up the *answer* was what you ended up with, not what you started out with, unless you wanted to spend time in the principal's office...
Thus, I have a hard time understanding the suggestions along the lines of
const int answer = 42;
int FuncUniverse() {
return answer;
}
now, where's the computation in that? I know my teacher would be suspicios of this methodology, and wonder where I'd got a teacher's edition...
Unless this is one of those *elegant* problems where the result is equivalent to the initial conditions...
He was dumbing it down so the Created could understand it.
for (;;) // shit happens
Mathematica beeped because an error has occured.
(Usefull help messages and Mathematica)
"A New Kind-of-Science," by Kind-of-Scientist Stephen Wolfrump, obeys its own Principle of Computational Equivalence: due it its repetitiveness, any two randomly chosen passages from "this book" are equivalently pompous. There is no need to precisely define what this "equivalence" means: following Wolfrump, who never deigns to precisely define the notions of complexity and randomness he uses, one gathers that the new kind-of scientist operates by first refusing to define his terms and then dismissing the relevant technical literature altogether in favor of something more grandiose. These are only two of the many methodological innovations of this new kind-of-science that Wolfrump has bestowed upon humanity, as he points out in a passage explaining how he regards your cowering in his awesome presence with equanimity.
Certainly the title of the book, "A New Kind of Science" lends itself to new hyphenated adjectival forms, such as "visiting new-kind-of-scientist," and innumerable others that might be generated with cellular automata.
Wolfrump claims to be inverting the procedure followed in engineering and computer science, which attempts to invent machines and technologies to perform functions and run processes whose features are known in advance-- one obvious use of computer technology, for example, is to run processes that we want to execute; Wolfrump seems to be considering cellular automata and asking, what do these things compute? There is nothing novel about this--scientists routinely consider new technologies and constructions of all sorts and ask about their usefulness; it remains to be seen whether the cellular automata lead to a "new kind of science," against the objections of John Milnor, who Wolfrump cites anyway as if Milnor was attempting to be helpful.
Wolfrump says that simple rules give rise to complex patterns that often appear random; however, until these terms are defined, they are unscientific adjectives. The theory of computational complexity attempts to rank computational processes within one or more hierarchical classification schemes; each classification is a measure of "complexity" and the precise location of a computational process or algorithm within any such scheme is taken as
a precise definition of what one might intuitively mean by "complexity." Wolfrump makes references to one such classification scheme in connection with the logical complexity of mathematical formulas, but I have not seen a ranking of the complexity of various cellular automata according to some notion of complexity. Similar remarks apply to his use of the term "random."
Incidentally, Gregory Chaitin gave Wolfrump a rave review. This is because Chaitin is a raving maniac. A thumbs up from that retard is no endorsement.
Wolfrump has written the kind of book L. Ron Hubbard would have aspired to, if he knew enough.
"A New Kind-of-Science," by Kind-of-Scientist Stephen Wolfrump, obeys its own Principle of Computational Equivalence: due it its repetitiveness, any two randomly chosen passages from "this book" are equivalently pompous. There is no need to precisely define what this "equivalence" means: following Wolfrump, who never deigns to precisely define the notions of complexity and randomness he uses, one gathers that the new kind-of scientist operates by first refusing to define his terms and then dismissing the relevant technical literature altogether in favor of something more grandiose. These are only two of the many methodological innovations of this new kind-of-science that Wolfrump has bestowed upon humanity, as he points out in a passage explaining how he regards your cowering in his awesome presence with equanimity.
Certainly the title of the book, "A New Kind of Science" lends itself to new hyphenated adjectival forms, such as "visiting new-kind-of-scientist," and innumerable others that might be generated with cellular automata.
Wolfrump claims to be inverting the procedure followed in engineering and computer science, which attempts to invent machines and technologies to perform functions and run processes whose features are known in advance-- one obvious use of computer technology, for example, is to run processes that we want to execute; Wolfrump seems to be considering cellular automata and asking, what do these things compute? There is nothing novel about this--scientists routinely consider new technologies and constructions of all sorts and ask about their usefulness; it remains to be seen whether the cellular automata lead to a "new kind of science," against the objections of John Milnor, whose work Wolfrump cites as if Milnor's study of Wolfrump's work in the 80's was in anyway favorable to Wolfrump. It wasn't.
Wolfrump says that simple rules give rise to complex patterns that often appear random; however, until these terms are defined, they are unscientific adjectives. The theory of computational complexity attempts to rank computational processes within one or more hierarchical classification schemes; each classification is a measure of "complexity" and the precise location of a computational process or algorithm within any such scheme is taken as
a precise definition of what one might intuitively mean by "complexity." Wolfrump makes references to one such classification scheme in connection with the logical complexity of mathematical formulas, but I have not seen a ranking of the complexity of various cellular automata according to some notion of complexity. Similar remarks apply to his use of the term "random."
Incidentally, Gregory Chaitin gave Wolfrump a rave review. This is because Chaitin is a raving maniac. A thumbs up from that retard is no endorsement. Cheatin' Chaitin didn't even notice that Wolfrump never even goes through the universal algebraic motions of defining morphisms of cellular automata--an incredible ommision for someone purporting to study combinatorial and algebraic structures. Chaitin should know that Wolfrump's pseudo-math is on too low a level to be of interest to a practising mathematician or physicist.
Wolfrump has written the kind of book L. Ron Hubbard would have aspired to, if he knew enough.