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.

Comments

Don't hold your breath for reviews!

[Raetsel]

• "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?

Re:I'm reading the book

[GMontag451]

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.

Quantum Mechanics has already suggested that both space and time are discrete on small scales, and I believe there is quite a bit of indirect evidence to support this claim. The discreteness is based on Planck's constant, and the unit length and unit time are approx.10^-33 cm and 10^-43 sec respectively (which if you do the math are equivalent if you equate 1 year and one 1 light year). All lengths of space or time are either multiples or one over a multiple of length.

The claim that they are structured as a network of nodes is certainly speculation, but it is at least a logical speculation. The points would probably have to be connected somehow.

Complexity Theory

[kmellis]

Salon published a sort of a review of Wolfram's book recently titled "The Next Newton?". Talk about hyperbole.

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.