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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.
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."
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.
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/
-
"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
If the initial state is the existance of a single point, there's not much to it.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
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.
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...
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
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/
Your initial state was something close to a point, too.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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 :)
*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
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/.
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
surely you need relativistic mechanics to describe the orbits themselves
As I vaguely recall from a physics course long long ago, Newton's equations are not wrong. There is a derivative term that everyone assumes is a constant, but written as a derivative, which is not constant under relativistic effects. Written properly, Maxwell's equations would be still be valid with relativistic effects. Classical mechanics is just a simplification of relativistic mechanics.
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.
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.
It could also be done in 6 lines of very readable Python code. *ducks*
-
Postulate 1: Knowledge is power
-
Postulate 2: Time is money
-
As every engineer knows, Power = Work/Time
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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"
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.
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!
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.
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/
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
repeat {
lather();
rinse();
}
You assume that the subset of human viewable "images" of the universe are infinite. Assuming that human color perception is finite, and that "images" are a combination of color, depth (also finite, you can only see so far), and arrangement in your visual perception (also finite), then obviously, there exists a finite number of possible combinations of the 3.
If I recall my college Behavioral Psych courses correctly, the human eye maxes out at about 7 million different hues--considerably less than the 16 million shades of 24-bit color.
:)
Sorry.
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); }
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.)
Maxwell's equations are valid regardless of relativity, in the same form they were laid down by James Clark Maxwell in the 19th century.
In fact, the importance of Einstein's contribution was changing Newtonian mechanics to comply with some of the strange consequences of Maxwell's equations, such as the constancy of the speed of light. So physics had to adapt to Maxwell's equations, not the other way around.
Join the NFSNET. Our prime goal is making little numbers out of big ones. http://www.nfsnet.org/
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'm not sure if this is what you're referring to, but one of our teachers showed us how you can derive "E=mc^2" from one of newton's equations by not throwing away the derivative-of-mass term. Unfortunately, this derivation required an equation from special relativity as well, which was definately not part of newtonian mechanics.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
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..)
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.
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
that probably explains why noone really understand the universe then...
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.
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,
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.
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!
Where did God come from then.
I don't know. But that doesn't mean that God doesn't exist, it just means "I don't know". I don't know where YOU came from either, but that doesn't mean you don't exist.
I don't exist, but I'm answering you.
This answer doesn't exist, but it is answering you. You did not reread this.
Puzzle that my imaginary friend.
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
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?
(..)
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?
Not every image, but only every possible 1000x1000x(2^24) image would get rendered.
But how can that be, since although the number of possible combinations (64^1000000) is unfathomably large it is still finite,
There are (2^24)^1000000 = 2^(2,4 x 10^7) = an insane large mumber.
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?
You should be more careful, when calculating. And have more respect for the combinatorical explosion. You underestimated the size of the number.
Once again, however, you are still under the assumption that the set is infinite. It is most undoubtedly not, however.
Like I previously pointed out, the 3 factors that make an "image" unique (color, depth, and FOV) are all finite...therefore the combinations of the 3 are all finite. Of course, with the small "pixels" humans can distinguish, you would be looking at an incredibly large number of "images"...but still finite (and calcuable by someone with the facts and figures of how many colorws we can see, how many "pixels" we can distinguish, etc.)
Couple of problems with that. Time really isn't divided into discrete intervals. If you look at theories that incorporate virtual particles, then you have processes that exist on time scales that are by definition undetectable according to Heisenburg's principle. Second, those forces you mention are hardly fundemental. First, there is the fact that electromagnetic and weakforce have already been shown to be just two facets of the electro-weak force, and second, if you look at theories that say that these forces are transmitted via carrier particles, then you've got to look at the processes that govern *those* particles. In reality, there is nothing that says the universe should be simple. Humans strive for it because it's easy to understand, but there's an equal chance of the universe being infinately simple, infinately complex, or something in between.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...