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A New Kind of Science
First things first - have I read this book? Hell, no, and if anybody else says THEY have in the next year, they're lying thru their teeth. This book is so dense that if Wolfram had added a single additional page, the whole thing would have imploded into a black hole. That's got to be the only reason he quit writing and finally went to press.
I've been waiting for years for ANKOS to come out. I ordered my copy Tuesday when it was released, got it on Thursday and I've been skimming it like mad since. To give you some idea of how engrossing this book is, I was reading it Friday morning at 4 AM in the bathroom of a Motel 6, curled up in a bedspread on the tile floor to keep from disturbing my wife and stepdaughter during a trip to my stepson's graduation. I've got four college degrees, one in math and two from MIT, and bottom line - this sucker's gonna take a while to digest. However, it's theoretically straightforward enough that anybody with a high enough level of obsession and a few years to stay glued to it can follow it in its entirety. In ANKOS, Wolfram certainly comes across as arrogantly cocky but in the final analysis is he a crank or a revolutionary genius? Who knows, but it's going to be a new nerd pastime for the next decade to argue that point.
ANKOS is 1250+ pages divided into 850 pages of breezy exposition followed by 350 pages of fine-print notes. The exposition is composed of 12 chapters and the notes have about a paragraph per page of topic- and name-dropping technobabble to let you know where to go next for more details on whichever of Wolfram's tangents strike your fancy. Topping the whole thing off is a 60+ page index with thousands of entries in even smaller typeface than the notes.
Despite its length, ANKOS is not a rigorous mathematical proof of anything as much as it is a superficial survey of a vast new intellectual landscape. And what a landscape Wolfram has laid before us. It's all about cellular automations, which have traditionally been relegated to the realm of mathematical recreations. Start with a black square in the center grid square (cell) on the top line of a sheet of graph paper. Think up a few rules about whether a square gets colored black or white on the next line down depending on the colors of its neighbors. Apply these rules to the squares on the next line of the sheet of graph paper. Repeat. Watch what happens. Sounds simple. It isn't.
The first short chapter outlines Wolfram's central thesis: That three hundred years of mathematics based on the equals sign have failed to provide true insight into various complex systems in nature, and that algorithms based on the DO loop can succeed in this endeavor where mathematics has failed. The reason, claims Wolfram, is that deceptively simple algorithms can produce heretofore undreamed of levels of complexity. He claims that while frontier intellectual efforts such as chaos theory, fractals, AI, cybernetics and so forth have hinted at this concept for years, his decade of isolation studying cellular automata has taken the idea of simple algorithms or rules embodying universal complexity to the level of a new paradigm.
The second chapter outlines what Wolfram calls his crucial experiment: the systematic analysis of the 256 simplest rule sets for the most basic cellular automatons. He discovers this "universe" of rules is sufficient to produce his four so-called "classes" of complex systems: order, self-similar nested patterns, structures and most importantly, true randomness. The first two lead to somewhat familiar checkerboard-type patterns and leaf-type fractals; the last two, unforeseen unique shapes and unpredictable sequences. Wolfram stresses that the ability of simple iterative algorithms to produce complex and unique non-fractal shapes as well as truly random sequences of output is in fact a revolutionary new discovery with subtle and profound implications.
The third chapter expands his initial 256-rule-set universe of simple algorithms with many others Wolfram has researched for years in the dead of night while others slept. Rule sets involving multiple colors beyond black-and-white, rule sets that update only one grid square instead of a whole row, rule sets that embody full-blown Turing machines, rule sets that substitute entire sets of patterned blocks into single grid cells, that tag end point grid squares with new patterns, that implement "registers" and "symbols" - Wolfram has examined them all in excruciating detail. And no matter how complex the rule set is he explores, it ends up generating still more and more unexpected complex behavior with many notable features as the rule sets are implemented. This ever-escalating spiral of complexity leads Wolfram to believe that cellular automatons are a viable alternative to mathematics in modeling - in fact, embodying - the inherent complexity of the natural world.
In chapter four, he begins this process, by linking cellular automatons to the natural world concept of numbers. Automatons that multiply and divide, that calculate prime numbers and generate universal constants like pi, that calculate square roots and even more complex numerical functions like partial differential equations - Wolfram details them all. Who needs conscious human minds like those of Pythagoras or Newton to laboriously work out over thousands of years the details of things like trigonometry or calculus? Set up dominos in just the right way, flip the first one and stand back - nature can do such calculations automatically, efficiently and mindlessly.
Chapter five broadens the natural scope of cellular automations from one-dimensional numbers to multi-dimensional entities. Simple X-Y Cartesian coordinates are left behind as Wolfram defines "networks" and "constraints" as the canvas on which updated cellular automatons flourish - always generating the ever-higher levels of complexity. More Turing machines and fractals such as snowflakes and biological cells forming organs spontaneously spring forth. So far we've seen some really neat sleight-of-hand that Martin Gardner or Michael Barnsley might have written. But we're only on page 200 of 850 with seven chapters to go, and Wolfram is just now getting warmed up.
Chapter six is where Wolfram begins to lay the foundation for what he believes is so special about his insights and discoveries. Instead of using rigid and fixed initial conditions as the starting points for the cellular automations he has described, he now explores what happens using random and unknown initial conditions in each of his previously defined four "classes" of systems. He finds that while previously explored checkerboard (Class 1) and fractal (Class 2) systems yield few surprises, his newly-discovered unique (Class 3) and random (Class 4) cellular automaton systems generate still higher levels of complexity and begin to exhibit behavior that can simulate any of the four classes - a telltale hint of universality. Furthermore, their behavior starts to be influenced by "attractors" that guide them to "structure" and self-organization.
With the scent of universality and self-organization in the air, Wolfram begins in chapter seven to compare and contrast his cellular automations to various real-world topics of interest. Billiards, taffy-making, Brownian motion, casino games, the three-body problem, pachinko machines - randomness is obviously a factor in all of these. Yet, Wolfram notes, while randomness is embedded in the initiation and influences the outcomes of each of these processes, none of them actually generate true randomness in the course of running the process itself. The cellular automations he has catalogued, particularly his beloved Rule 30, do. The realization that cellular automations can uniquely serve as an initiator or generator of true randomness is a crucial insight, leading to the difference between continuity and discreteness and ultimately to the origins of simple behaviors. How, you ask? Hey, Wolfram takes most of the chapter to lay it out in a manner that I'm still trying to follow: no way can I summarize it in a sentence or two.
By chapter eight, Wolfram believes he has laid out sufficient rationale for why you, me and everybody else should think cellular automations are indeed the mirror we should be looking in to find true reflections of the world around us. Forget the Navier-Stokes equations - if you want to understand fluid flow, you have to think of it as a cellular automation process. Ditto for crystal growth. Ditto for fracture mechanics. Ditto for Wall Street. Most definitely ditto for biological systems like leaf growth, seashell growth and pigmentation patterns. This is very convincing stuff - tables of Mathematica-generated cellular automation shapes side by side with the photos of corresponding leaves or seashells or pigment patterns found in nature. Yes, you've seen this before in all of the fractals textbooks. The difference between fractals and cellular automations: fractals are a way to mathematically catalog the points that make up the object while cellular automations are a way to actually physically create the object via a growth process. It's a somewhat subtle difference - and a key Wolfram point.
Having established some credibility for his ideas, Wolfram stretches that credibility to the limit in chapter nine, where he applies his cellular automation ideas to fundamental physics. It was practically inevitable he would do this - his first published paper as a teenager was on particle physics, and that's the field he got his PhD in from Cal Tech at age 20 before going on to write the Mathematica software program and make his millions as a young businessman. Despite his solid background in physics, this seems at first blush to be pretty speculative stuff. He shifts his focus on the cellular automations from randomness to reversibility, and describes several rule-sets that both lead to complexity and are reversible. This behavior is an apparent violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. From Wolfram's way of thinking, if the universe is indeed some kind of ongoing cellular automation, then it may well be reversible and the Second Law must not be the whole story, so there must be something more we have yet to learn about the nature of the universe itself. He continues extensive speculations on what this may be, and how space, time, gravity, relativity and quantum mechanics must all be manifestations of this underlying Universal Cellular Automation. The rule set for this ultimate automation, which Wolfram believes might ultimately be expressed as only a few lines of code in Mathematica, takes the place of a mathematically-defined unified field theory in Wolfram's world. This is mind-blowing stuff, but ultimately boils down to Wolfram's opinion. I have great difficulty in comprehending space and time and matter and energy as "mere" manifestations of some cellular automation - if so, what is left to be the "system" on which the automation itself is running? I'm reduced to one of Clarke's Laws: The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine ...
Wolfram shifts from Kubrick-style religion back to mere philosophy in chapter ten, where he explores how cellular automations are perceived by the human mind. Visual image perception, the human perception of complexity and randomness, cryptography, data compression, statistical analysis, and the nature of mathematics as a mental artifact are all explored. The chapter ends on a discussion of language and the mechanics of thinking itself. Wolfram reaches no real concrete conclusions on any of these, except that once again cellular automation is a revolutionary new tool to use in achieving new insights on all of these topics.
Chapter eleven jumps from the human mind to the machine mind by exploring not the nature of consciousness but the nature of computation instead. He goes here into somewhat deeper detail on ideas he has introduced earlier, about how cellular automations can perform mathematical calculations, emulate other computational systems, and act as universal Turing machines. He focuses on the implications of randomness in Class 4 systems and the universality embodied in systems like that of his Rule 110. His arguments lead up to a closing realization, what he does not call but may one day be named Wolfram's Law.
The final chapter, chapter twelve, discusses what all of Wolfram's years of isolation and work have led him to conclude. He calls it the Principle of Computational Equivalence. What follows is an unavoidably oversimplified distillation of Wolfram's thoughts on the PCE. If indeed cellular automations are somehow at the heart of the universe around us, then the human effort to reduce the universe to understandable models and formulas and simulations is ultimately doomed to failure. Because of the nature of cellular automation computation, there is no way to come up with a shortcut method that will deduce the final outcome of a system in advance of it actually running to completion. We can currently compute a rocket trajectory or a lens shape or a skyscraper framework in advance using mathematics merely because these are ridiculously simple human efforts. New technologies based not on mathematics but instead on cellular-automations like wind-tunnel simulators and nanobot devices will be exciting technological advances but will not lead to a fundamentally new understanding of nature. Issues that humans define as undecidability and intractability will always limit the level of understanding we will ultimately achieve, and will always have impacts on philosophical questions such as predestination and free will. To conclude with Wolfram's own final paragraph in the book:
"And indeed in the end the PCE encapsulates both the ultimate power and the ultimate weakness of science. For it implies that all the wonders of the universe can in effect be captured by simple rules, yet it shows that there can be no way to know all the consequences of these rules, except in effect just to watch and see how they unfold."
As noted above, 350+ pages of notes follow this exposition, and trust me, there's no way they can be summarized. To mention one nugget I found amusing as I envisioned Wolfram working towards endless dawns on ANKOS, he thinks sleep has no purpose except to allow removal of built-up brain wastes that cannot be removed while conscious. So much for dreaming.
So what is the bottom line on ANKOS? It is a towering piece of work and an enduring monument to what a focused and disciplined intellect can achieve. It is very thought provoking. It will definitely lead to new work and progress on cellular automation theory and some interesting technological applications we should all look forward to with anticipation. But is it the next Principia, the herald of a new scientific revolution?
Read and decide for yourself. Only time, and a lot of it, will tell.
To read it yourself, you can purchase A New Kind of Science at bn.com. You can read your own book reviews in this space by submitting your reviews after reading the book review guidelines.
I've got four college degrees, one in math and two from MIT, and bottom line - this sucker's gonna take a while to digest.
1 + 2 = 4?
My 30 page paper due in 7 hours dosen't seem that bad.
I suggest seeing pi if you like this story.
Great soundtrack too.
Trolls, it must be cool to be that bored.
Go here, pick goodies, and karma whore to your hearts content.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
"Can you give us the answer to life?", they asked the computer.
Deep Thought pondered their question.
"Yes," he said. "But it will be tricky. And first I have to write Mathmatica."
(apologies to Mr. Adams fans)
Scifi had this all figured out already.
Will this 4 line algorithm that describes the Universe eventually simulate /. stories that appear twice in as many days?
If so, I'm a believer!
Well thought out review
Wolfram is looking at a piece of the puzzle, IMHO. Though his book seems to be a tour de force of applying specific cellular automata to generate all sorts of neat things, I don't see it as being particularly new. This is more a book to bring it to the attention of people in other fields who may be able to make use of it. Rather like Mandelbrot's The Fractal Geometry of Nature.
of "A New Kind Of Bullshit ; A stunning expose of the Scam that is Cognitive Science. Now that would be good reading.
Anyone know why is was published as one giant book rather than in a series ala Knuth?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
so, it sounds like this thesis is basicly saying that there is only so much taht we CAN learn and even reach with technology, becasue at some point, we will have no way to predict certain outcomes of complex systems.
hmmmm
well, like all major "discoveries" everyone looks back and says "duh...you can see that hear and there, I thought it was a foregone conclusion"
I think I will attempt this book....who wants to race?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
We were discussing this at work yesterday. As some of my collegues were quick to point out, this is all most likely toss. For cellular automata to be relevant you'd have to assume the universe has a finite number of 'states'. Quantum physics currently is pretty certain it is not.
The analogy used by the super math junkie of the group was that you can describe all physics with 2 equations; it doesn't mean that sheds any insight to anything though.
The one thing that is of interest to me is perhaps using the methods used to create fractals in factoring (since the numberline is self deriving from many many number lines masking one another).
Article header made it seem like this lopsided prodigy had discovered the real world. Instead he's just shifting his focus a few microns over.
I would love to read a book about more mundane concerns written by someone whose education was accelerated like that, to try to see what a world I already know looks like to them.
...the plural of "automaton" is "automata".
Oh, go on, check out my job.
...as the EULA that came with {insert Evil Product here}
:)
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
I am disappointed that a Physics PhD could miss out on some fundamental issues here. First of all: anybody who has worked their way through an undergraduate curriculum in Physics understands in a visceral fashion that there is an extreme difference between MODELLING the world with a construct, mathematical, computational or otherwise, and saying that the world IS such a construct. We are in possession of many equations that model certain interactions between different kinds of substances via different forces in the world. Traditional mathematics has yielded many useful tools for modelling these processes. Stating that computational theory or cellular automata may yield useful models as well is an obvious inference. Saying that all physical processes are fundamentally composed of elements that ARE cellular automata seems to me to be a non sequitor. Hell, we don't KNOW what anything in quantum physics or beyond IS really, we just know that certain relationships hold mathetmatically that we can translate in physical conceptions and understanding.
Now, the concept of emergent complexity and complexity theory in general - as I understand it, this is stuff that folks at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere have been working on for years, and that the understanding has been around for years that you can model many real-world processes well by systems such as cellular automata or other rule-based systems with complex emergent behaviors.
So... I am left wondering what to make of this book. Ultimately, it will speak for itself when I read it. But it sounds like it's a mix of already known fact with ego and some intuitionist insights into certain physical processes in a monolithic volume. If he PROVES anything interesting and fundamental about certain areas of physics or fluid dynamics, or presents models more useful and meaningful (i.e. that provide information NOT obtainable through current models) than he has produced a valuable scientific work. Otherwise, it's just an interesting treatise that may inspire more meaningful work by others who are more willing to work within the establishment and processes of the mainstream scientific world (not to say that those outside it CAN'T do excellent work, just that I'm not sure if Wolfram can).
Not Cellular Automation. You got this wrong not once, but every single time.
Flat5
...But is it the next Principia, the herald of a new scientific revolution?
Read and decide for yourself. Only time, and a lot of it, will tell.
Wow. The only way to get the result of if the book is a new revoltion is to watch and see how it unfolds? Thats somewhat ironic, isn't it?
TextFiles conspiracy files are a bit old but they are still a very interesting read. Whitley Strieber's Unknown Country covers a very broad spectrum of ideas and theories. Good stuff!
ahh the days of textfiles......
-tried to spell correctly this time. People seem to get irate with miss-typed comments.
-Tolerate my intolerance
...goes into a decade of seclusion to discover the secrets of the universe
I worry about that. Science isn't practiced very well in a vaccuum. One feature of the scientific act of discovery that makes it so effective is that the scientists involved are constantly examining each others musings, to keep any one of them from going off the deep end. Genius and madness go hand in hand, after all, and nothing can drive you nuts quite like being alone with your own thoughts. Especially if those thoughts are exceptional.
I just hope this book doen't show that dear Dr. Wolfram has lost it.
"I like to wear big boy pants."
I wonder if any of his data was based on programs that ran on the first Pentium chip!!!!
Wise men speak because they have something to say, Fools because they have to say something!!!!
Wolfram has said that he wanted to present the work as a single volume (rather than publishing it in journals) so that people can see the "entire work" all at once rather than as bits and pieces. I seem to recall Kevin Spacey in Se7en said the same thing, but it's his book so he can do what he wants.
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
From the introduction to Bit String Physics:
Seastead this.
I've'nt seen any examples of Wolfram actually using this stuff to model real world things. Certainly some token and acedemic things that he uses to visualize his theory but noe examples of modeling anything of any significance.
He claims to have created the most powerful tool in history but has not been able to create anything with it himself. Where are the examples of this theory doing things of significance? Model an atom, or gravity, for example. Nothing rigorous but just to show off the technology. Why hasn't he done this?
I read the article in Wired, and after reading the whole thing, it seemed like Wolfram spent a lot of time flapping his wings and trying to articulate the glory of his theories but never actually said anything at all.
There seems to be a bit too much hype here
Here's an excellent review (both critical and favorable at the same time) of Wolfram's book by someone of similar stature and experience - AI pioneer and successful entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil:
Reflections on Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science"
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
People are pretty gay about things being miss-spelled. Don't worry, mistakes happen, the keys on your keyboard move places. We understand.
-don't shove a fork up you nose
A book review written by a guy who hasn't read the book. Personally, I went through the first chapter of the book last night and I am pretty sure it is going to be tough reading (and I don't even have any degrees from MIT). I think a book review based on skimming the book is exactly what Wolfram is worried academia might do. Rather than listening to what he had to say, they have traditionally only listened long enough to gather ammunition against him.
Of *course* the universe is governed by simple laws of interaction. Of *course* they can't be effectively modelled in situ. Apparently in his ivory tower, Stephen hasn't been aware of the little fields called Chaos Theory; Emergent Behavior; Complexity. This stuff has been hot for twenty five years now in fields ranging from physics to artificial life, yet he seems to act as if he's discovered it ex nihilo.
No doubt Wolfram has the chops for this. In 1994 he wrote a thin little monograph called Cellular Automata and Complexity, which basically is regarded as the authority on 1-D cellular automata. But even at that point, CA's had been well studied, and their properties well understood with regard to modeling nature. So it's a little annoying to see Wolfram talking about how he's discovered this field. Literally. That's what he says. Very irksome.
And then there's the problematic fact: cellular automata cannot model the universe because while it may be discretized in the quanta sense, it has a continuous multidimensional combination. That is, you can rotate objects in arbitrary angles. To model such a thing, you need a system strictly more powerful than CAs, because a continuous environment presents an uncountably infinite set of states and a CA presents only a countably infinite set of states. It appears that Wolfram kind of brushes over this. He's got the right idea generally, but he himself has too simple of a model! -- odd, given that he's attacking scientists for using even a simpler model yet.
But scientists aren't using the simpler (non-chaos) models because they think that's how things work. They're not stupid. They're using the models because they're tractable. They can get work done with 'em. Scientists have known since, what, the 1950's, that the universe can, from very tiny and simple rules, produce massive amounts of complexity. That's why CAs were developed in the first place. This is hardly new stuff.
So, great. Wolfram has produced a landmark text on cellular automata. Which would be wonderful if he hadn't (apparently) spent half of the pages talking about how amazing he was for discovering that these CAs model the universe (which they can't) and further that scientists should be faulted for not using a chaos-based model of the world (which they've known all along). Fantastic.
Because 7(dec) == 31(hex)!!
Hmm. Either I'm totally misunderstanding you, or that's wrong.
7 in decimal == 7 in hex.
49 in decimal == 31 in hex.
This means he's almost certainly a crank. If actual scientists were arguing heavily about it, there might be a bit more uncertainty. But if the debate is happening amongst people whose knowledge of physics comes mainly from Star Trek, then that pretty much settles the matter in advance.
Wolfram will probably end up having a place on the intellectual fringes, worshipped by people who are often smart but who haven't bothered/aren't trained well enough to see why specialists don't really pay attention to them. In nerd idea-space Ayn Rand is the other main example of this type.
The best comment I've read about Wolfram's book comes from Cosma Shalizi, a physicist working at the Santa Fe institute, who specializes in cellular automata. He comments [scroll down on link]:
Dis-recommended: Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science [This is almost, but not quite, a case for the immortal ``What is true is not new, and what is new is not true''. The one new, true thing is a proof that the elementary CA rule 110 can support universal, Turing-complete computation. (One of Wolfram's earlier books states that such a thing is obviously impossible.) This however was shown not by Wolfram but by Matthew Cook (this is the ``technical content and proofs'' for which Wolfram acknowledges Cook, in six point type, in his frontmatter). In any case it cannot bear the weight Wolfram places on it. Watch This Space for a detailed critique of this book, a rare blend of monster raving egomania and utter batshit insanity.]
I await solid arguments to the contrary --- ie, arguments that don't start from any of the following premises:
1. But he was a boy genius at CalTech and Feynman said so!
2. But he wrote Mathematica, which is obviously really hard!
3. But if he's right this will change the world!
4. But other Scientists are ignoring/laughing at/refuting him only because they are jealous of his enormous brain!
5. But he only ignored peer review because he's so brilliant!
6. But every work of genius always seems crazy when it first appears!
I leave it was an exercise to the reader to show why Wolfram's supporters shouldn't rely on these points (although Wolfram himself apparently does).
thats a bit dumb. this is on the same page as the review. on slashdot. I didn't think you could slashdot slashdot.
Man Needs God Like Birds Need Helicopters
Please note that the book is about cellullar automatons, not cellullar automations, as the reviewer repeatedly insinuates.
--- Sigmentation Fault - Comments Dumped
Guess I don't need to buy it now...
is that he is saying that the world is the model. he is trying to pull down this separation, and as a result is stating that traditional mathematics will never get to a complete understanding, because it is itself a model with a degree of separation.
Pfft!
I could have done it in 2 Lines with Perl!
This
I think he's a troll.
He's delebritly misquoting beloved science fiction stories and delebritly mispelling words!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
"And indeed in the end the PCE encapsulates both the ultimate power and the ultimate weakness of science. For it implies that all the wonders of the universe can in effect be captured by simple rules, yet it shows that there can be no way to know all the consequences of these rules, except in effect just to watch and see how they unfold."
First of all, thanks for spoiling the ending! =)
So what it boils down to is we can't have enough foresight to control the future.. Damn, foiled again!
--Martin
They believe that their calculations provide a deeper meaning into the Nature than what "mere experiments" ever can. It's amaznig that even these days you can read sentences like "...soon the ab initio calculations will let us design materials without having to resort to experimentation" in professional journal articles (the quote was actually from a Reviews of Modern Physics article!).
It is as if experiments are something to get away from!
Well, in a sense I can understand these guys because experimental observations often prove that the simulations and theories they hold so dear are simply wrong. Yet, some of them refuse to believe it and claim that the experiments must be wrong. Poor creatures...
A mathematical equation or simulation is idle speculation until it is backed up by solid experimental evidence. If it is not or cannot be verified by experimentation it's worth nothing.
What does this mean?
The review begins with a a grand statement about how the author hasn't even read the book -- the first inidcation that the reviewer is reviewing reactions and interviews, and not Wolfram's actual words.
But then again, this is Slashdot... ;)
All about me
If he really wanted to crapflood slashdot, he could post the whole text of Wolfram's book, one page at a time!!
(I'm making fun of the length of Mr W's book, not making judgement on its insight. Really!)
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Well, it would be like Wolfram if the movie didn't have anything to do with pi, and the guy was weird just because he was weird.
Big story.... Schon @ Lucent fraud. He's the molecular transisitor guy (was discussed previously on slashdot). Story was submitted... Check out http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/ for details... This should be covered on slashdot as it is of _major_ importance. http://capitalist.blogspot.com for thursday may 15th has more details as well as comparisons of two identical plots from very different papers/experiments.
A new paradigm
Algorithms and DO loops
Equals sign is out
It seems that a quantum representation (a matrix of cubits, if you will) could compute all generations of a cellular automata, especially if initial conditions are known.
I wondered what the guy who disappears in my closet has been doing for the last ten years...
Now I'm not saying the guy isn't crazy as a loon but alot of the "revolutionary" work in physics has been done outside of the academic world (which tends to be better for incremental improvement). Anytime something requires true leaps, working on your own has advantages:
Newton
Wiles (Fermat's Last Theorem Proof)
Galileo
Heisenberg
Many others
OTOH, to this list you could also add
UNABomber
Many others
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
What this most made me think of is DNA. DNA is just oodles of four-state variables that represent some kind of program. It is exactly like the cellular automata he's been working with. Looking at the code (the DNA itself) and the output (the organism produced) perhaps we can understand the underlying algorithm that uses the code to produce the output. Unravelling, understanding, decompiling, reverse engineering, or whatever you want to call it, the secrets of how the DNA code is executed could be the biggest scientific advance ever, and Wolfram may have provided the tools to do it.
Suprisingly there was no reference to this in the review, which probably indicates no discussion of it in the book. Cybrpnk2, is it true that he did not discuss DNA?
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
You eat the ass cock fucktard!
When we talk about general relativity, we say "spacetime is curved." We don't say "spacetime has model that includes curvature which accurately predicts some experiments." Why? It's just tedious to always emphasize that the model is a model; it's easier to just say "is." It doesn't mean the distinction is lost on Wolfram that he doesn't emphasize it.
Another example: we say massive bodies have gravity. We don't say that the motion of masses in the presence of other masses can be modeled with gravity. There "is" gravity. The model nature of gravity is implied.
Flat5
``What is true is not new, and what is new is not true''
Would this have been 'true' of the general theory of relativity just after it were published also? I think not! What kind of a bullshit attitude is that?
Actually, *Mr.* Wolfram is a knob, has a hard time keeping his more talented employees (most of whom quit due to regular verbal abuse by Stevie), and is more properly labelled a paranoid whose delusions of grandeur force him to be very secretive about his private details (should an employee find out in which town he actually lives, they are told never to tell anyone). Why? ...cause he's a self-obsessed knob. He may have been quite the sharp tack at one point in time, but that time has certainly passed, and he knows it.
Yes, but what does Alex Chiu think?
(BTW, since Archemedies Plutonium is dead, who is the premiere net.kook these days?)
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It really is too bad that child genii like RMS, Wolfram and Hawking are so rare in modern society. They do great works in their lifetimes that are viewed as incredible successes for science or society, and create so much value people get excited whenever they speak.
Sadly, we have an education system that works *against* the production of such people. To "create" a child prodigy you need to have them interact primarily with adults, given the freedom to learn and study on their own, with only occasional encouragement, and to keep them primarily at home, away from other kids. Play dates are okay, but daycare keeps them from developing at their own pace.
If we switched to a different state-sponsored style of education, the entire world would benefit, save for the tall, proud, rich few who have a vested interest in the status quo. Prodigies, when they make big changes, destabilize things, and make the world brighter, clearer or more amazing for the rest of us.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
Wonder if Wolfram got a bit pissed off when he :)
saw The Matrix and realised they stolen his idea?
In ANKOS, Wolfram certainly comes across as arrogantly cocky but in the final analysis is he a crank or a revolutionary genius? Who knows, but it's going to be a new nerd pastime for the next decade to argue that point.
Ya it will be a nerd passtime to argue about it...but then again these same people argue about star trek physics and star wars aliens as well...
It won't be an academic passtime to argue about that though, because it will be quicky identified as a tangled web of ramblings from some washed up "prodigy"...
Why would someone get four undergrad degrees? What you couldn't hack a doctorate program or something?
>>snip
To mention one nugget I found amusing as I envisioned Wolfram working towards endless dawns on ANKOS, he thinks sleep has no purpose except to allow removal of built-up brain wastes that cannot be removed while conscious. So much for dreaming.
>>
There's really a tremendous amount of scientific literature on the role of sleep focusing on the role of sleep in consolidating the events of the day into long term memories by storing important events and dumping unimportant ones. The hypothesis that the reviewer and Wolfram are apparently referring to (sleep allows neurons to clear waste and rebuild neurotransmitter supplies) may have some validity, but no one in sleep research would consider it the whole story. I'm a bit worried about Wolfram's grander conclusions if he's missing basic literature in fields outside his own.
Disclaimer: I haven't read the book either, so I don't know the full context of Wolfram's claims on sleep
...to tell us how "great" he is? This book is a more of a self-tribute than anything else; a work of megalomania, not science. Of course, who am I to judge the work of "the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today", as he claims to be. I'm obviously unqualified, because although I make my living as a researcher in scientific computing, I've yet to encounter a single important innovation in this field due to Dr. Wolfram. This is obviously an example of my shocking ignorance. =)
Will McCarthy's Bloom
ISBN: 0345424654
In a nutshell: Nanites eat the earth and humans attempt to come to terms with their existance scattered among the other planets.
Deals heavily with what is humanity, what is life, what is Life, and what is randomness...
*A)bort, R)etry, I)nfluence with large hammer.*
Pretty decent interview/story with him in this month's wired, mainly about the book.
Don't wait to be hunted to hide. - SB
He's delebritly misquoting beloved science fiction stories and delebritly mispelling words!
I take it you deliberately spelled 'deliberately' incorrectly...
There is an interesting article in Newsweek about how Wolfram is very different from another very prolific inventor Dean Kamen. Kamen is the one who invented portable kidney dialisys machine and Segway Human Transporter.
First, a review written by a guy who says he hasn't read the book. Second, a bunch of responses by people who haven't read the book. You guys need to figure out that there's a difference between having an informed opinion and farting through your mouths. And yes, I've read the book. It was remarkably easy reading.
Slashdotters might like to consider that Wolfram doesn't have much of a stature in the scientific world. He sure was a child prodigy and all that, but hasn't lived up to expectations - his forays in quantum physics, cosmology and cellular automata, albeit not devoid of value, have been run-of-the-mill, and largely
unoriginal.
It might of course be the case that he has come up with something extraordinary in his new book. All the signals are however pointing to yet another publicity stunt to expand his bank account. If nothing else, by publishing the book himself (nothing wrong with that, by the way) he is eschewing the basic scientific
principle of peer review.
In a nutshell, Wolfram probably is totally finished as a scientist; maybe bitter, for having been unable to live up to the high expectations he foreshadowed as a young man, and probably just interested to exploit his background, and
the gullibility of many, to increase his positive cash flow.
and have known several others who have worked for him and I wouldn't put much stock in anything he says.
It was Sociology, wasn't it. Nobody wants to admit to a sociology degree. Stupid, stupid social science majors.
One of my college's courses in Sociology was entitled "Studies of a Contemporary American Subculture." It was a six credit 400 level course that met all summer.
The actual content: the students followed the Grateful Dead for six weeks, then wrote a paper about it.
I'm still convinced this is the single greatest course in all of college history: not only for the actual "Be a Deadhead" bit, but they got *six* credits for it.
I'm no longer convinced soc majors are dumb at all.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I do not have a background in Math but rather in philosophy. These ideas, as described in the review, are not new. Gottfried Wihelm Leibniz's Monadology discusses the Monad, an elementary individual substance which reflects the order of the world and from which material properties are derived. Aristotle taught teleology (the fact or character attributed to nature or natural processes of being directed toward an end or shaped by a purpose) thousands of years ago.
Right. And since the effort to reduce the universe to formulas has been breathtakingly successful beyond the wildest dreams, while the cellular automata approach (and related new-age "Santa-Fe-style" chaos and complexity theories) have yet to solve their first problem of any significance, we have to conclude that the book's central thesis is a huge bunch of baloney.
Maybe Douglas Adams was right about the Earth computer!
Wise men speak because they have something to say, Fools because they have to say something!!!!
I don't have any real background in this area - but I go through a cyclic obsession with CA's every few years.
I think this all started when I read Steven Levy's 'Artificial Life' book at university.
Looks like this is something else to go on my wishlist...
How many times does it have to be said?! Grok the book first, then review it!! And, no, I haven't read the book either; I can't afford to buy books right now and the public library doesn't have a copy.
Wolfram could have saved a few forests by reading Godel's second Incompleteness Theorem. Wolfram simply moves the insight out of logic into the "real" world. His suggestion of using cellular auotmata as a substitute for strict identity is interesting and would correspond more closely to the metaphysical essence of scientific knowledge than identity. Now, all he needs to do is show the logical necessity of using cellular automata rather than identity for certain types of problems and he can pick up the prize for proving the N/NP theorem.
This has nothing to do with the post. It has everything to do with how a rant on a two year old bad movie can get posted, but a story on genetic manipulation won't. Yes, it's grousing, but dammit, i'm tired of this crap. So here it is in all it's off-topic glory...
The picture alone is worth the read. An Isreali genetics expert has engineered the worlds first naked chicken. This new breed of chicken has no feathers, grows faster and produces less fast than the average clucker. He's almost kinda cute in a tasty, space alien sort of way...
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... that someone would have pointed out that Tesla figured all of this out years ago by now.
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
I could've done it with one line in APL.
http://www.wolframscience.com/preview/nks_pages/?N KS0017.gif
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
There's extensive coverage of this book, maybe even by someone who's read it, in this week's Nature (16 May issue).
Sadly they have a closed subscription list.
Key quotes include:
Gene Stanley, a physicist at Boston University, has used other mathematical methods to study some of the same systems that Wolfram considers in his text. Stanley does not believe that cellular automata can do everything that Wolfram ascribes to them, but says that the book has persuaded him that they are more than just a curiosity. "This is a much-needed complementary approach," he says. "It's a profound book, perhaps the book of the decade."
And:
But to many, the fact that Wolfram's ideas still lack the predictive power of established theories built on more conventional mathematics is a sign that the wunderkind has come up short. With the book's publication date having been repeatedly pushed back, some speculate that Wolfram has been striving, but never quite succeeding, to pull off his promised scientific revolution. Michael Berry, a theoretical physicist at the University of Bristol, UK, remains unconvinced that Wolfram has done more than embellish the basic idea that simple systems such as cellular automata can generate complexity. "We've known this for 20 years," says Berry. "He'll have some fans, but I think others are going to react strongly against him."
Their bottom line - the jury is still out how much this is hype and how much real advance. There are also some interesting insights into how Wolfram conducts himself too.
I didn't get very far after I realised that every new rule I added (more than one data bit per cell for example) made the automata more and more like the conventional method of simple numerical equation solving - i.e. grid the problem out then change the value of some numbers at each grid point according to a differential equation. Any sufficiently complex system should be able to model most of physics, so is this really anything new?
That said, it's always handy to have different maths methods around, and this may be handy for some systems...
So where do I get in line to be assimilated?
"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
The reviews of this book bring up an interesting point that I have wondered about for a number of years. Is there in fact some proof that the only way to find out the final state of a cellular automaton is to run it? How do we in fact know that it's not collapsible to some sort of mathematical function? I have been thinking that if it were possible to do this, and we found out how, we could predict complex phenomena much better than we can now.
Actually, *Mr.* Wolfram is a knob, has a hard time keeping his more talented employees (most of whom quit due to regular verbal abuse by Stevie), and is more properly labelled a paranoid whose delusions of grandeur force him to be very secretive about his private details
I agree. I was just trying to be polite. He could have been a very productive citizen of the math/scienctific community. Instead, he chose isolation, perhaps falsely believing that a community of inferiors could offer him nothing. Now, after years of isolation and not having anyone to bounce his ideas off of, he releases his "opus". Is it cooincidence that he believes "that algorithms based on the DO loop can succeed in this endeavor where mathematics has failed", when his only successful contribution to the world has been his scientific programming package?
"I like to wear big boy pants."
cybrpnk2's "review" is an insult to book reviews, and timothy posting it is an insult to weblog readers. A much more honest article, and a much more articulate discussion of Wolfram's book can be found here.
Thad
I eventually wrote Wolfram Science an email, partly out of jest:
Only problem was that I originally wrote it without censoring myself, then corrected the censor in my email body, but not my subject. Despite the vulgarity, I still managed to get a very professional response:Oops... ]:)
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Recently I read An Elegant Universe by Brian Greene which (in my opinion) the best string theory for the masses book released to date. Brian Greene starts with about 4 chapters on basic physics, followed by about 4 chapters on the basic mathmatics (without the actual equations) of string theory. The last 4 chapters describe many, some a little too much for my taste), consequences of the science.
From the review, you can draw some parallels between Stephen's cellular automations and multi-dimentional strings. By Stephen's view strings are nothing more than complex versions of the cellular automation model, primarily because string theory's strings interact by a set of 'rules'. Which is valid to a point.
However instead of stopping there, string theory is the attempt to describe the basic mathmatics which in turn describe the basic behavior of the basic elements of the universe. Yes, from there very complete behavior is also evident. It seems the peice Stephen missed is that in the real universe is _might_ also be possible to describe simple mathmatic rules which yeild his cellular automations.
I would love to have one of my submissions actually make it to the front page. So why does this guy get his book review posted, when he didn't even read the book. Let's establish some kind of standards here.
Rules:
1. Book Reviews: You must actually read the book.
2. Movie Reviews: You must see the movie.
etc.
There was an article in NewScientist on the 9th February (subscription required to view the article), "What Lies Beneath", about emergent systems. It discusses that we may never know the true nature of the universe; of what it is made of.
Robert Laughlin (Stanford University) is researching this. What we observe in the universe is model-independent, and we cannot actually see the model itself.
"The laws that govern large-scale phenomena will not be deduced from the laws that govern tiny particles, he says. "It's in the same way that flocking behaviour can be characterised without understanding everything about birds, or superconductivity without understanding atomic theory."
This idea is called emergence. It's a familiar phenomenon in the theory of condensed matter, which is Laughlin's background. Solids and liquids sometimes play host to strange entities that bear little resemblance to the atoms making up the substance."
...
"If what you see is model-independent then you can't learn anything about the underlying equations by observing it," says Laughlin. "You could call this the dark side of emergence."
...
"What we emerge from is unknowable," says Laughlin. "The underlying equations of the Universe cannot be determined from what we know."
The article goes into greater detail than I can here, but it definitely an interesting read.
If all this is true, we can never really know the true mechanics of the universe. It may actually be a simple "4-line" automaton. It could be a billion other things - we'll probably never know.
Science is a cooperative enterprise- building on the insights and mistakes of others. Even fellow eccentric-recluse-genius Isaac Newton said "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulder's of giants". Wolfram's insight may be a way of describing things, but it may not be the best way, or the most comprehensive. He's got to work with others.
I don't think Slash has a line anymore. I'm beginning to think that while they claim to be "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." it's actually becoming more and more a good ol' boys club. Because I can't honestly think of a reason why some of the crap I've seen here lately was posted. Do you need to know one of the editors to get a story posted? Or maybe it's a special coupon. Why else would crap like last weeks movie review be posted? It wasn't news (or new), it wasn't a review (rant, maybe) and it sure as hell didn't matter. It wasn't even for nerds. Maybe I just have a lower tolerence for this crap, but dammit, the BS is getting deep around here.
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Perhaps this is a dumb, ignorant question, but what is the difference between Wolfram's Cellular Automata and the relatively old conceptual tool used in artificial life (and maybe used for other things?).
Is Wolfram's idea a generalized theory of the tool used for ALife? A new application for that tool? Something completely different?
The review goes on to say how he has been skimming it but the text it too dense to have read within the time of release and the present time -- the first inidication that the poster is responding to very little of the actual review, and not cybrpnk2's whole essay.
;)
But then again, this is Slashdot...
-no broken link
Pi was a great movie... even for NON-math majors. I know a few friends of mine who "hate math" enjoyed the movie immensely!
Since, according to the reviewer, nobody will be able to digest this book for at least a year, perhaps we could get a Slashdot interview with Wolfram?
I assume you are speaking of Rebecca Adams' class
Field Research Methods and Applied Social Theory
at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro
That class actually did produce several published
papers and eventually a book with more papers
from the students' experience.
Although it does seem a bit frivolous on the
surface, I've read the book and it is quite
detailed and objective - a balanced look at the
social structure and community of deadheads.
details on the book at amazon.com
However think of the philosophical implications if it turns out we're all just lightened grid squares being generated by a few lines of code in Mathematica?
:)
You can explore thoses implications in the SF book
Permutation City by Greg Egans (which is , imho, an EXCELLENT book by the way). To be short, in a near future where the brain of people can be digitalized and then "live and think" in computers (by simulating the physics of the molecules composing their neurons), someone discovers that no physical computer is really needed to run those simulations. Just modelize the data of the scanned brain + the turing machine of the computer in a cellular automaton,
and let it develop "mathematically".
To answer to the initial poster of the thread: I personnally think that, ultimately, the model IS the universe. You can't dig forever in the substrate of space-time and physics laws and keep finding "real" things; maybe the "universe" is only a mathematical concept, which exists in itself (things like the Realms of the ideas of Plato).
If you think about a hypothetical "physical world" simulated in a cellular automaton, like the one in Permutation City, with 1) an initial state, and 2) determinist rules. When you sets 1 and 2, every "future" state of this world "exists" mathematically, even if you never run the simulation on you computer. The Mandelbrot Set "exists", all the geometry theorems "exists" even if we don't know them. Moreover, all initial states and all evolution rules, somehow, exist! Even if they are not reachable by us, each of these virtual/potential universe are REAL for the sentient beings that populate them.
I don't know if I *really* believe in this view of things, but at least I find it plausible. Maybe it's the equivalent in mathematics to believing in God. Some mathematicians thinks that mathematical objects (laws, theorem, "true" and "false" propositions) exists "somewhere" independantly of our ability of proving them (discovering them); others are more formalists and views these objects only as man's creation and play, whithout any transcendental reality. (I'm not a native English speaker, so maybe those are not the rights words, but Realism and Constructivism are two such opposing doctrines. By the way Realism seems not to have the same meaning in Math. and Physics...)
I suppose nobody can convince the other part on such a non-provable, non-scientific philosophy, anyway
This means he's almost certainly a crank.
The critics of great minds, like Erich von Daniken, Noam Chomsky and Emmanuel Goldstein all say the same things about them that you say about Stephen Wolfram.
So now who's the crank?
Thank you
I hope that this book gets wide spread. Not because I think that Wolfram is correct, I don't presume to know that answer. But I do believe that this book will spur on a great deal of scientific inquiry, that cannot help but to lead us somewhere extraordinary.
Do not confuse duty with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different.Duty is a debt you owe to yourself.
Which is not to knock the present author, just to add that he may be more mainstream than is widely appreciated.
Now will someone hurry up with the time machine so I can read this book?
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Wolfram shifts from Kubrick-style religion
:) I've just been reading about Wolfram in Steven Levy's Artificial Life... very surfacey magazine style treatment, but good stuff nonetheless.
<honoured bow>
Thank you, thank you...
</honoured bow>
Seriously, it looks like I'll be buying this when I can find a copy. It looks pretty damn interesting, whether or not the guy's a kook.
deus does not exist but if he does
Daniken, good one. Mind if I use that?
For those curious (or who know already) about Conway's Game of Life, the best implementation I've seen is a Java applet by Alan Hensel. It has numerous popular patterns preloaded (including a Turing machine, IIRC). It's primary characteristic, though, is blazing speed - an order of magnitude faster than any other implementation I've seen, including compiled ones.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
The difference between fractals and cellular automations: fractals are a way to mathematically catalog the points that make up the object while cellular automations are a way to actually physically create the object via a growth process. It's a somewhat subtle difference - and a key Wolfram point.
,representational Western European painting and certain types of traditional oriental painting, such as Chinese and Japanese landscapes.
Science aside, this is an excellent description of one of the differences between traditional
The representational Western Eurpean tradition is predicated on describing what the eye perceives. The oriental tradition is predicated on movements with brush and ink that mimic the growth and development of the subject itself. Compare a Dutch still life of flowers with a Chinese painting of bamboo. The Dutch still life is a photograph; the Chinese painting is a visual record of the growth of a bamboo plant.
Makes me wonder about the extent to which the Western European world view is hindered by the inability to be both a participant and an observer at the same time....
Here's Wolfram's preface to the book:
Glue two Male chickens alongside each other, so that they are facing opposite directions. Place them on the ground and they will accumulate a charge as they try to attack each other facing in different directions.
Get three female chickens and place them on the ground facing away from each other. Attach three rubber bands to a ring and then tie each of the three ends to the three chickens. Stand one chicken on it's head, and you will have a proton, or a hydrogen chickion.
As the chickentron gets near to the proton, the males in the chickentron will each in turn try to get closer to the females. But since they are spinning, they alternate between trying to attack each other and trying to movve towards the females. this produces a stepping pattern which brings them in a stable orbit around the proton.
The hydrogen chicken-cluster is a stable atom. However, by introducing an high energy photon, the chickentron can be dislodged
Get another chicken, and put blinders on him, so that he always walks in a straight line. Point him towards the hydrogen atom and let him go. When the photon chicken strikes the atom, you should see an the chickentron spin away.
The hydrogen chicken plasma exihbits the same qualities as a true plasma but it has an advantage that time is sufficiently slowed that one can observe individual reactions within the plasma.
Between these covers are 10 years of experimentation, blood, sweat, and henpecking. I lost an eye...but it was worth it. The revolution has begun.
-Steven Wolfram
One of these days you will figure out what that post meant to! HAHAHA!!!
You retards crack me up!
Well, that would explain a lot of things...
Sure, it's a 2-liner, but is anybody going to be able to maintain it 20 billions years from now? Huh?
Every year we talk about sending them to a "normal" school, and every year we don't.
So far the kids seem to be ok -- people say they are pretty bright -- they just seem like our kids to me.
The big downside is I never see my wife (she teaches the kids in the AM and works in the PM), and the kids handwrighting is pretty bad.
Any other homeschooling parents/kids out there?
-- ac at work
It is not a thought of wrong or right, we're just perhaps wary of the "Earth shattering" connotations everyone seems to be placing upon the work. And as the review reads, it doesn't seem to prove or describe things as much as try to get people interested in the field.
... I don't have an opinion (and neither should you or your co-workers, unless you've managed to snag a copy sooner than I) because I haven't read it yet. I've read some articles on it, and some reviews, by people that may or may not understand it (likely the latter ... most reviews, including this one, contain disclaimers about "I didn't get this part" and such), and while that whets my appetite, it should not form any kind of predisposition or opinion IMHO.
... for all I know it may require years of remedial education before I can even understand it, much less comment intelligently on it). One thing is certain, most groundbreaking work is initially rejected out of hand by a conservative establishment ... an indication of one of the weaknesses inherent in our current system. Which isn't to say it doesn't have many strengths, what I am rather trying to say is that to assume one conclusion or the other ahead of time is a mistake.
... and he isn't the only one to have done work in that field that has led to hints of something very profound wrt information theory, cellullar automata, and the underlying nature of our reality. Right or wrong in its final conclusions, this work is likely to sparc a great deal of productive activity and research if it even lives up to a fraction of its billing.
First, I wouldn't trust any reviewer of the work. I would read it yourself and draw your own conclusions. That is exactly what I intend to do when I receive my copy.
Second, I agree, skepticism is what any critically thinking person should have when approaching any work, particular a work which claims to offer a new paradigm shift in scientific thought. I disagree with uninformed people lauding his work before they've read it (as you allude to) as much as I do people who are dismissing it because it doesn't map to their preconceptions. Both extremes are wrong
That having been said, the claim may very well be right. I really don't know (and I may not even know after I've read his work
Your coworkers used an inaccurate argument (which exposed some commonly held misconceptions about quantum physics that was the foundation of their argument) to argue for dismissing his work outright, or at least starting it with a fairly closed mind and a rather strong predisposition regarding its contents. That IMHO is a mistake...the work will stand (or fall) on its own, but it should be considered from a skeptical, but ultimately neutral, position.
It is not you I am arguing against, it is against dismissing his work without reading it, which the fallicious argument I rebutted seemed to imply would be justified.
By all accounts this guy (Wolfram) can be arrogant and annoying. He is also indesputably a genius, and his past performance, scientific and mathematical work, and achievements more than justifies that this work, however revolutionary in its arguments, however anti-establishment in its creation, however controversial in its conclusions, at least be considered fairly and not dismissed out of hand.
He really could be on to something
I am waiting impatiently for my copy for this very reason: whether I agree or disagree with the guy, I'm going to enjoy having my mind challenged in ways it hasn't been for far too long.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I've got four college degrees, one in math and two from MIT, [...]
;-)
I'm guessing the last isn't in "how to use preview".
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
I picked up my copy of the book this morning, and have just finished reading it, and all references cited in the footnotes. It was mildly interesting and informative, but overall disappointing. There was nothing in it or the references which could show me how to get hard carriage returns in my sig.
hi!
Go read/watch "Fast Times at Ridgemont High". It was written by Cameron Crowe, another "wunderkind". Based on his experiences after spending an undercover senior year in high school.
Anyway... running such a simulation would therefore produce everything around us... and running it to the end-game will tell us what happens next.
Kinda like this idea... take a 64 x 64 matrix where only 8 shades of grey can exist. Produce every possible combination (yes, it's a lot)... but eventually you will produce a subset of every possible and impossible picture (rendered in 8 shades of grey) that could ever exist or not. One of the pictures will be you. One of them will be you with a lamp shade on your head, etc... (granted, at 64 x 64 x 8 - very pixelated - but you get the drift).
Hard to know which picture is real and which one isn't - especially since one of them will undoubtedly be George W Bush.
The MIT guy can't even spell correctly. Calls "Cellular Automatons" as "Cellular Automations". Hmmmm.....
We were discussing this at work yesterday. As some of my collegues were quick to point out, this is all most likely toss. For cellular automata to be relevant you'd have to assume the universe has a finite number of 'states'. Quantum physics currently is pretty certain it is not.
From the review, wolfram claims to have addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division... with these he can generate all rational numbers... plus he claims to be able to generate trancendental numbers like pi, that seems to imply that he can make all real numbers. I haven't read the book, but I see nothing in the review that would preclude these methods from describing an infinite number of quantum states or even a continuum of states.
By the way, saying that the universe has an infinite number of quantum states is basically just saying that there is no maximum entropy for the universe. (the entropy of a system is a measure of the number of quantum states in a system). However some cosmologies have a 'big crunch' ending the universe which would imply some maximum entropy and therefore a finite number of quantum states in the universe.
What is clear (from the Big Bang theory) is that there currently is a finite number of quantum states in the universe that is increasing with time. That is, the universe currently has some finite entropy that we can assign a number to and that entropy is increasing with time. The entropy is finite because the universe had a set beginning where the entropy was zero (if the universe didn't exist, it didn't have any quantum states).
There are theories other than the big bang (like steady state cosmology) that have no fixed beginning to the universe. However, these all have a finite value for entropy in the universe (at least locally) for other reasons (see the "Heat death of the universe")
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
No one knows. The beginning and the end of the story. Enjoy the ride people.
"Skimming" is not reading, and the reviewer's opinion is meaningless if he hasn't had time to digest the book. The reviewer BEGINS by declaring his or her ignorance and lack of effort -- that's just plain irresponsible.
This is a book, not a TV show or a movie; it will still be available a month (and probably ten years) from now, giving a reviewer plenty of time to actually READ the book before commenting on it. Then the review might have some credibility.
All about me
What scientist hasn't based his work on his predecessors work?
I agree...I saw it on videotape a year or so ago...the movie Pi certainly fits my mental image of Wolfram working on ANKOS...
Sure we can build a machine that simulates enormously complex systems based on simple relationships and stuff. But what will this tell us other than that we have just built a machine that can simulate complex relationships using simple intital conditions and rules. The problem with these tactics is that the end product cannot be predicted by initial conditions. We cannot know with any certainty at all what the result will be without simulation. We cannot learn anything only try stuff out.
If this is the most efficent way to do things human endeavour gets relegated to managing a whole bunch of monte carlo optimizations (or genetic algorithms or whatever). But it certainly isn't Understanding these systems, however inprecisely, however rudimentarily, is what needs to be done. If no estimation at all of final outcomes can be made there is no point in doing any science. Instead we should just try stuff out randomly and write stuff down. But of course there is order in complex systems. Our universe is complex at small levels and predictable at some larger scales. The diffusion processes involved in semiconductor physics are predictable or I wouldn't be writing this and so on. If events seem unpredictable, we aren't looking at them the right way. Something must be said about future events based on initial conditions, something. Maybe not everything, but my guess is better than white noise, isn't yours?
... idiot.
'In pusuit of the greater good!
. . .well DUH. Weren't we all thinking the same thing anyway?
This guy and his friend Hart would stop trying to kill Angel!
This
There is no "right" or "wrong" that is of significance. All that matters is which we choose to believe in and how that influences our behavior.
We have come this far even though much past scientific "right" is now seen to have be incorrect; or at least seen as not the only correct description possible.
Was the work of Kant any less beneficial to mankind because his 'proof' that man has an apriori understanding of the physical world used pre-non-Euclidian geometry as the understanding that we are supposedly born with? Of course not. Kant may not have been correct but his views prompted other investigations that led to much of the social and scientific structures we live under today. (BTW, I'm not saying Wolfram is Kant!)
In the end, judgement of any work, any theory, any book of this scale, should not be based on whether the author is "right". It should be judged simply by the effect it has on the world. What actions does it prompt in other scientists? Does it alter the behavior of the man on the street? Will either praise or criticism of the book change mankind in any way and which is preferable?
Is this the longest reply list to a particular post in such a short time on slashdot? ever?
Pretty much the same as the others cited in that increadibly humerous post.
von Daniken is an "accomplished author" and "documentry" maker, thus his "research" into extraterrestrials must be spot-on!
Goldstein, he runs a popular magazine with lots of "technical breakthroughs" so he really should be listened to when it comes to the Constitution and Economics!
Seriously, I busted a gut when I saw that group of names!
... Idiot, I rest my case. Are you a lawyer perchance?
;P
Paradoxically speaking, you are still a witty idiot!
'In pusuit of the greater good!
However, I think it's a real problem that he is not presenting any results. At the end of the day, any scientific method has to be judged by the results it produces, and all Wolfram does is to re-cast familiar results in terms of cellular automa.
So to sum it up -- if you're dying to learn about cellular automa, read the book. If you're looking for a revolution, I'm afraid you'll have to start it yourself...
The interactive way to Go -- http://www.playgo.to/iwtg/en/
I've gone through peer-review several times and it's mostly an exercise of massaging the egos of people in the field who are 'respected' just for being in the field for so long and who haven't really produced anything new in their lauded carreers. You go through a ton of busywork making sure you have the right damn font and you have all of the right people referenced (whehter or not you actually used their papers) and you get paid nothing, the journal takes your copyright and charges you $10 to make fair use copies of your own damn paper.
In academia, if you have a good idea someone will steal it, if you have a great idea they will dismiss you without listening to it. If you don't believe me, look into whether or not Watson and Crick _really_ discovered the structure of DNA or if it was a grad student who's ideas they orginally dismissed.
In academia there's this absurd notion that if someone understands your explanation of a new idea that they somehow helped you come up with it.
So Bravo to Wolfram for thumbing his nose at academia! I just hope he can back it up.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Fredkin went down this road a few years ago, but didn't succeed either. He and Wolfram used to work together, but they seem to have split up.
If anybody ever finds a simple CA that results in a system that behaves like physics, there will be a short, world-famous paper that will put them down in history with Newton and Einstein. But this isn't it. To Wolfram's credit, he isn't claiming that it is.
Look, I've thought about buying the book.
But I've seen a number of reviews, and a pattern seems to be emerging:
People inside the field think it's interesting, but nothing new save stuff about Rule 110, whatever that is.
People outside of the field think it's amazing.
My impression is that people outside of the field are misattributing their amazement with CA itself to amazement with Wolfram's intellect. That is, this is their first real exposure to CA, and they attribute things to Wolfram that should be attributed to a community of researchers.
Now, you can lambast people all you want for referencing reviews and giving impressions of things based on reading reviews. But I'm on a limited budget, and if I get any whiff of egomaniacal BS, I'm not going to fork $50 over for it.
Examining patterns in reviews is a very worthwhile endeavor. There's no way to purchase everything to evaluate it yourself; we all rely on reviews to some extent to make choices about what we do and don't do. Being aware of impressions based on reviews is just being aware of things at a different level.
They guy in the original post was basically just saying "My impression is such-and-such; you can do whatever you want, read this review yourself." My guess is he might look it over in the bookstore, but not buy it. He's just saying that it's something to think about.
I say, link to more reviews, and give your opinions based on those reviews! If someone can't tell the difference between impressions made based on reviews, and those based on the book, they've got other problems.
This is exciting to me because of a pet idea of mine:
The concept of Planck distance and Planck time (it is possible that there is a minimum meaningful distance or unit of space, and a minimum meaningful unit of time)implies a granular universe that would be best modeled by cellular automata. I'm headed out to purchase this at Stacey's _now_.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
He shifts his focus on the cellular automations from randomness to reversibility, and describes several rule-sets that both lead to complexity and are reversible. This behavior is an apparent violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Any physicist who has studied modern particle theory can tell you that reversibility has to do with more than just entropy. It is a basic fact of perticle theory, having to do with the symmetry of operators.
When you (this is experimental by the way) change the charge of particle, it's fundamental properties change in some cases, meaning that this is not a symmetric operation. When you change the parity (think of rotating a coordinate axis), it's fundamental properties change in some cases. In most cases, when you change both parity and charge at the same time, the fundamental properties of a particle remain the same, meaning together they are symmetric operators. Under the weak interaction, this does not hold.
When you reverse time for one particle (now theoretically), it should not change the physics or properties of the particle. We have seen that CP violation occurs in weak interactions, but CPT (charge, parity and time) violation does not. If time did not change the properties of the particle, CPT would have the same ~2% violation CP does. Because we can see that CPT is not violated, time reversal is not a symmetric operator.
All this means is that there is more than just entropy preventing a reversal of time, there is a seperate rule which prevents a reversal of time in any case where the weak interaction is involved.
Not to mention, that generally in science when we come up against a Law, we try to find an error in our data or thinking BEFORE claiming the law is invalid.
sorry... I'm a little bitter as I'm working on a paper now... or rather I should be instead of reading slashdot.
Peer-review has its uses, especially in filtering out crack-pots with perpetual motion machines. That said, its not the only way or the best way to publish, especially if you have something that is as new and revolutionary as Wolfram claims. He's got enough information for people to reproduce his results, so he's not a crank... he just might be wrong.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
I was wondering: There are 256 rules in the basic CA case, however half of those are mirrors of the other (i.e.: the left side is equal to the right side) and half of each one of those are equivalent to the other half since in one case they're black and the other white while the shapes are the same.
So I was thinking, is this an insight into why we have negative and possitive charges (left and right mirror images) and antimatter (black-white equivalence)???
Perhaps Wolfram has seen further, because he is surrounded by midgets. (In the intellectual sense, of course.)
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
Hopefully the pressures of changing the world don't drive Wolfram to drill a hole in his head.
Perhaps the ideas presented in this book are The Truth, and perhaps they're complete bunk. Either way, it would behoove us and the scientific community in general to not dismiss them out of hand. History taught us this lesson:
Several hundred years ago, it was commonly-accepted scientific truth that the Earth was the center of the Universe, and the rest of the Universe could be accurately represented as a series of concentric spheres surrounding our planet. The motions of the sun, moon, stars, and other planets could be described and predicted according to this model. Mathematicians and astonomers worked very hard for many years to compile the formulae necessary to accurately predict when and where celestial objects would be at any given time. With some basic equations soaked in corrective bits and fragments of formulae, they succeeded.
Their initial concept model was fundamentally flawed, but yet they were able to devise laws and principles which could still provide accurate results.
Then, along came Galileo, Copernicus, Ptolemy, et. al., who proposed another fundamental concept for the organization of our little neighborhood of the Universe. Using this new model, different (simpler) formulae were able to achieve results just as accurate, if not more so, than the ones before.
It's the nature of us to wonder how things work, and the nature of many of us to actually bother to try and work out the answer. For those people so inclined, they should never ever discount the possibility that it isn't the right formula which is eluding us, but that our fundamental point of view may be flawed.
Does Wolfram's work provide us with one of these Point of View leaps? I have no idea, I'm in no way qualified to answer that question. However, please don't discount such proposals out of hand simply because of their novelty. Else we resign ourselves to a science of tweaking what we "know" is the truth in an effort to conform to ever-more complicated facts, rather than one of discovery of new truths, wherein the most unfathomable may become obvious and rudimentary.
That said, it's time to go make some coffee and get back to programming.
Coffee is my drug of choice.
A common miconception is that DNA is just a 4 valued string sequence and you can find everything you need to know from the sequence. Each 'unit' of DNA is a complex irregularly shaped physical molecule floating in a sea of water molecules which aren't just featureless bulk solvent, but structured around the DNA. Every unit of DNA you add the more complex this gets. DNA folds, bends twists and physically interacts with other complex molecules; it is through these interactions we get things like gene regulation (which genes turn on when in what conditions), transcription, recombination etc.
Sequences have provided us with a wealth of information, but the fact is that when we talk about what DNA "does" in a cell; we are really trying to solve a many body problem. We dn't need to explicltly solve the problem to find out a lot of cool things which we already have (bu observation) but there are many things that staring at sequence data alone wont tell you.
I have great difficulty in comprehending space and time and matter and energy as "mere" manifestations of some cellular automation - if so, what is left to be the "system" on which the automation itself is running?
Maybe all those crazy bible thumpers were right and the unniverse only exists because God thought it so. Hey, its an interesting take and maybe the tie between science and religeon.
I guess if you spend 20 years studying one topic, it inevitably becomes the answer to the universe. From the ANKOS web site
And in fact what I've discovered is that some of the very simplest imaginable computer programs can do things as complex as anything in our whole universe.
I think Feynman and Hawking would disagree. Quantum mechanics is proving classical computers can't exactly simulate even the tiniest building block, the atom.
things in our universe somehow follow rules that can be represented by traditional mathematical equations. The basic idea that underlies A New Kind of Science is that that's much too restrictive, and that in fact one should consider the vastly more general kinds of rules that can be embodied, for example, in computer programs.
Anything that can be done in a computer program can be expressed mathematically.
Point being, it is not the answer to everything Wolfram seems to tout it to be. And I have not even seen the book. But I'm sure it's an exhaustive study of a fascinating subject.
is gonna love this.
Up next
'A Newer Kind of Science'
by MatLab founder and chief scientist Cleve Moler
He's got so many degrees he's got a fever!
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Edited to 1 page:
1.618:1
or here
or here
No need to get your panties in a bind slashweenies. Wolfram is a known crank and poseur. Although he managed to snooker Feynman and Gellman into thinking he was the next Feynman or Gellman, he never managed to produce anything of lasting value in particle physics. He was known as a shameless reference hound, trying to snag credit for every obvious idea that came down the pike. And his showpiece creation, Mathematica, has been shunned by serious practitioners of symbolic manipulation in favor of Maple which is much more solid, though less showy. Wolfram was well known for giving customers the old "its not a bug, its a feature" routine when they pointed out Mathematica was giving erroneous results.
Wolfram's reputation here at Tech is rather low. Interestingly enough his Mathematica is shunned in favor of Mathlab here as well.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he was so overbearing as an (Asst.?) Prof. that he in fact drove two undergrads into nervous breakdowns. Seems even other geniuses couldn't live up to Wolfram's impossibly high standards.
Intelligence and common sense (people skills too) seem to correlate inversely.... Sad but true.
Surely you mean Pi was a great movie only for non-math majors. It was an unmitigated pile of pretentious arty wank. There was nothing in it that was actually about maths or science that I could see. Did the writer actually have any sort of scientific background?
In my opinion it was a poorly done peice of art-student claptrap which the writer tried to give a scientific flavour to in order to appear intellectual.
If the grand conclusion is that we can't figure out all of the universe's behavior using our logical thinking processes, equation-based or automation-based, well, duh, that has been known for a long time. Assuming the quite likely case that the human brain is a form of a turing machine, it has been proven that those machines can't solve all problems.
I also cast my stone in with the skeptics of the "lone genius". Folks, the world of science is so complex, specialized, and developed these days that the days of Newton and Einstein holing up and shattering the universe with individually conceived theories are increasingly unlikely. Much like David Brin's essay on heroism versus democracy, significant science is advanced by collective effort, not by the singular mad genius. It is only our predilection to anoint kings and heroes which discredits those that lay the groundwork and trumpets the attention seekers, and gets them tenure and research grants.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
When are the Cliff Notes coming out?
T.
T.
SoftLogic Solutions
http://www.softlogic.8m.com
If you can do so, and link to proof, you should publish a book too!
Hey, I admitted up front that I had not "read" ANKOS (as in, "think about and consider the subtlties of every single word the author has written") because to do otherwise and claim I HAD read the book would generate 10 times the number of negative comments saying, impossible, the reviewer is just blowing smoke. It was meant as a flag to take the review that follows with a grain of salt, altho I ***do*** think what I wrote is a pretty good summary of what a reader will find when they pick up ANKOS for the first time. The release of ANKOS is news - lots of people have been waiting lots of years to see it. Wait until a true "reviewer" has really "read" ANKOS and it's no longer a current event - hey, journalistically it's a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't situation. At least I was up front with what the true situation was and produced something (I think) worthwhile as an orientation to ANKOS. The real next step, as pointed out elsewhere in these posts, is to go straight to the horse's mouth and for Slashdot to interview Wolfram...his contact info is here.
The book seems to already be out of stock everywhere I look. The Stacey's clerk I spoke with suggested it was some sort of "Cabbage Patch" thing, implying manipulation of supply to feed demand.
She also pointed out that for someone with the physics & math background it should be enjoyable. Gee, I never treated people who bought _Brief History of Time_ like that. Besides, I have learned a lot by reading over my head.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
So I think that implies that even the universe should have a finite number of states.
Would someone who knows what they're talking about please comment?
lather...rinse...repeat
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
A very smart jackass, but a jackass nonetheless. I'll be buying his book too, but let me note how he threatened legal action to delay a former employee from publishing an interesting proof, that one of Wolfram's pet CA's was a universal computer. Why? So that some of the thunder of Wolfram's book wouldn't be lost, I guess. Well, he has some fine ideas and may well be celebrated in the future. But he is a jackass.
One of the basic "proofs" of Wolfram's thesis seems to be that he can generate pictures from cellular automata rules that look like actual physical objects. Why is this so significant? What difference does it make whether a picture of a leaf is generated by a fractal algorithm, a camera lense or a cellular automata rule? Sensory characteristics are, for the most part, emergent properties that do not exist at even the cellular level, let alone the atomic or subatomic. So what is all the fuss about? Am I missing something here? Does anyone of any scientific standing actually think that fractals or cellular automata rules "explain" the universe?
One conclusion I came to on my own a while back was that our science cannot possibly DEFINE the true nature of an object, event, or living creature; It can only DESCRIBE it in terms of what we perceive with our senses, in the terms of what we use as mathematics.
;-)
To clarify: One cannot look at, say, a dolphin and claim to know, just from observation, that their brain will perceive a visual image or sonic echo in a certain way. One can set up experiments to test the critter's visual acuity (been there...), or how well their built-in sonar works (done that...), but the results of such experiments will still only be DESCRIBING how these senses work in terms of how we, as humans, perceive that they worked. They can't possibly DEFINE how they work in terms of the dolphin's perceptions.
It sounds as though this book is, in a way, reinforcing that view. At least to my perception.
Most interesting...
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
First things first - have I read this review? Hell, no, and if anybody else says THEY have in the next year, they're lying thru their teeth. But I saw it today and I've been skimming it like mad since. In the final analysis is cyberpnk2's review truly insightful or a worthless heap of verbage? Who knows, but it's going to be a new nerd pastime for the next day to argue that point.
It is said that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite period of time would produce all the greatest works of man.
This review: 4 monkeys, 20 minutes tops.
This poster's name secretly replaced with Folgers Crystals
As I discuss at length in A New Kind of Science, systems like cellular automata are a generalization and an alternative to the mathematical equations that have traditionally been used to make models of natural systems.
Seems pretty clear.
Read the autobiography of John Stuart Mill, the classical liberal. The poor guy started ancient Greek and Latin at three, and proceeded to study mathematics, economics, and philosophy.
Of course, he had a mental break-down in his early 20s.
In other words, Wolfram rediscovered that you can implement a Turing machine with cellular automata.
I learned that in my Theory of Automata class in Grad School.
To see how banal this is, consider someone writing a book to show how all the laws of mathematics and physics and science that we know can be written as computer programs. Nobody would blink except at the colossal waste of time.
...a review of Star Wars Episode 3, due out in 2005. It hasn't been filmed or written yet, but that shouldn't stop us from reviewing it.
This sounds strangely familiar. Didn't someone once posit that the only way to tell if a reasonably-complex program is going to end or not is to run the program and wait?
So the Universe is also subject to the Halting Problem. And this took 10 years? Or did he also found the church of Conway in the process?
-- Spring: Forces, coiled again!
The subject was Nature's response to James Lovelock's first paper submission after leaving industry / academia.
James Lovelock manages to practice research independently in part du to holding patents in gas chromotography. As in independent thinker he has been able to ask questions that are hard to ask within academia. Today Nature is happy to charge me $15 to read a trivial and uninformative review of Wolfram's book or charge me a couple hundred $US for a subscription. Acacemic presses are well supported by tax and corporate research funds. Yes this is a luxury I peronally can do without.
Lovelock's co-author Lynn Margulis remains in academia but has the scars to show just how poor the academic model can be for recognizing important new work. Her key discovery that eukariotic cell structure originated in a symbiotic relationship between prokariotic cells and bacteria was initially derided by her peers, and took years to be recognized as one of the more important results of modern biology.
Neither of these individuals is especially comfortable with their celebrity status. Lovelock is quick to point out that many people in the green movements 'not only don't understand science, they hate science'. Margulis remains a professional biologist who is extrarodinarily dedicated to teaching and to furthering the science of 'simple(sic)' organisms.
Three other examples who spring to mind are authors JRR Tolkein, JK Rowling and Robert Pirsig. All three created works that are important in that they have become part of the wider culture, and were all rejected by 20-30 publishers.
Pirsig in particular is entirely ignored by academic philosophy. His unique synthesis has had influence in both mainstream and academic thought, yet academia dismisses his work. Pirsig draws heavily on Poincare who's work included many of the key ideas of relativity a couple of decades before Einstein and others developed the necessary frameworks for fully understanding these.
Whether or not Wolfram is important either within academia or in the larger context of society in any case will not be determined on /., and pinning thei idea that he is some sort of luser based on his inevitable notoriety herein is hardly a solid hypothesis imo.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
Think of it several thousands years ago (millions if you like)we started with a quite simple society which has evolved into very complex global neighbourhood. And still we aren't able to describe this in any formula. And still there are lots of people who won't fit into it this society.
Life is not math but a gift!
(first posting - sorry for any errors)
r i88a/html /
The article that blew my mind at Princeton as an undergrad in April of 1988 was in the Atlantic "Did the Universe Just Happen"
http://digitalphysics.org/Publications/W
It unified many things that I had been thinking about and solidified my commitment to computers as an analytical framework (algorithmic).
It's weird to me that Wolfram/Article/Comments don't mention: Digital Physics, Fredkin.
I hope the book is as enjoyable as Godel, Escher, Bach & the rest.
? Anybody else have a copy of Autodesk's CA Labs.
Some links:
http://digitalphysics.org/Publications/
Embrace all dualities. Ted
Seuss - I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends. My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends
For a start, the reviewer with 4 degrees should know that it's an automaton, not automation, and many automata, not automations.
Hasn't Wolfram ever heard of algorithmic information theory (a.k.a. Kolmogorov complexity theory)? AIT defines a bit string of length n to be random (relative to some programming language and encoding of programs as bit strings) if there is no program of length less than n that produces the bit string as output. (The length of a program is the length of the bit string encoding the program.) I've yet to see any other more satisfactory definition of randomness -- all the other definitions I've seen have either been vague or circular. By this definition of "random", the patterns produced by Wolfram's cellular automata are clearly not random, precisely because a small set of rules suffices to produce them!
...Why on earth does the book needs to be 1200-odd pages? Was it just me, or did the first chapter simply restate the same basic idea over and over and over again? If it practiced what it preaches, this book could have been a single-page essay, from which all the contained ideas would be trivial corollaries.
I do agree that it's kind of neat that simple cellular automata can engender apparent complexity and simulate Turing machines, but wasn't this shown of the game of Life a long time ago? And although the rules per cell are very simple, the actual computation must be massively parallel to achieve any reasonable speed, making it a dubious prospect for useful implementation on modern hardware, unless we were to switch to FPGA's or something.
I suppose I should continue skimming the book, but I haven't seen anything mind-blowing in the first few chapters... Anyone know what I'm missing? (besides my 45 bucks?)
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
I agree with you; I think the benefits of peer-review are overrated.
That having been said, however, as you say, it does weed out crackpots and others, such as those with big egos who have nothing new to say.
I also believe that it does improve the publishing process overall.
The thing about peer-review is that at least some is necessary. What concerns me about Wolfram isn't that he bypassed peer-review, it's that he bypassed it completely. After publishing a bit, it's seemed to me that the worst that can happen is that your paper will end up in a lesser-known source. So even great ideas that are rejected by the community will end up somewhere, they might just not be the best sources. Eventually, if the ideas are good, people will probably get a hold of them.
Wolfram could have published his "findings" in less reputable sources, and then summarized them later in a text such as the one he produced. The way it is now, he releases this enormous tome, proclaims it to be the inspired word of God, and expects us to accept it as the new ten commandments of scientific thought. If he had allowed for discussion of it along the way, we would know more about it, he might have recieved useful feedback, and it might have been a better text. He could have gotten input, thought about that input, and then released his text however he wanted.
It seems clear to me that he's just avoiding getting input from others because he doesn't want to listen to others. If he's going to publish a text himself, he doesn't have to listen to others, but he could have. The fact that he chose not to is what concerns me.
This is not a case of someone rejecting the peer-review process to avoid the worthless bureaucracy. It's a case of someone rejecting any input or discussion of his ideas at all.
As part of a class I took a couple of years ago, I undertook a literature survey of the work done to adapt CA to fluid dynamics and hydraulics. I found a 200-page doctoral thesis, and a 600 page USAF technical report. Basically, CA cannot accurately describe fluid dynamics without a lot of extra work, on the part of both the modeler and the computer you want to run it on. After that much work, you might as well have used your favourite computational Navier-Stokes solver.
Maybe Wolfram's method will describe things better, but what good is it if it doesn't provide better insight into what it is describing?
I'd rather be flying
What's redundant?
This clown is claiming to generate "true randomness" from rules. If you're to brain dead to spot the simple problem with this then there's no hope for you.
oh.
sure.
give away the ending!
thanks a LOT cybrpnk2.
i didn't see any "spoilage warnings"!
- Cleave that kunst.
"The direction controls are the same in Nethack as they are in vi." "Yeah, I hardly ever die in vi anymore."
Could he have just made machines and experiments, rather than knocking us on the head with a 1000 pages...
The reviewer did a pretty good job of presenting balanced review, I think.
And the parent poster was beginning the predicted discussion (crank/genius.) He wasn't saying anything about the review, or the reviewer, jsut giving his opinion on the topic, and addressing a few off the possible counter-arguments (the appeal-to-authority type arguments.)
this book should come with a page of LSD in the appendix.
Church's thesis: all computational mechanisms of sufficient power are equivalent (e.g. by bisimulation). That sounds a lot like Wolfram's PCE.
Turing machines are an example of a universal machine.
So once you get simulation of a Turing machine, then everybody acknowledges that complexity arises, and universal complexity in particular.
Turing's original result was showing the non-computability of the halting problem for Turing machines, which pretty well sums up what the reviewer says is the final insight: there's no analytical shortcut for complex processes.
This is not new.
(Also compare with Goedel's incompleteness theorem about the existence of true but unprovable statements.)
And if you want a readable account of cellular automata and its relationship to complexity in general an universal machines, read William Poundstone's "The Recursive Universe". He told the story of the loads of people playing with cellular automata. It's *readable* and *digestible*. (I digested it when I was about 19...)
Actually, the mathematics behind this movies is a crap (and a big one). But I still like this movie, the soundtrack is really cool.
Hmm, Wolfram invents Mathematica, studies CA for countless, years, then decides that it is the model for the universe, existence, everything? Reminds me of an old proverb...
To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Still might be fun reading though....
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
Desire is not an occupation.
I think Wolfram found some fascinating things about CA but then gets carried away trying to make CA work where it probably doesn't. That's not science; it's nepotism for one's personal theory. Sure, I'm lured by the possibility of finding a kink in the armor of our understanding of entropy but I'm not holding my breath that there must be one since CA contradicts it.
Seems to me that any sufficiently complex system which has sufficiently flexible rules can model anything if you tweak the rules enough - including the universe. And indeed if I learned anything so far it's that CA is incredibly complex and flexible.
But that's a one-way statement: just because 'A' can model 'B', it doesn't mean that the inner workings of 'B' >are 'A'. That is, unless you can prove that no other systems exist which can model 'B'.
I mean, my monitor can display any image because any image can be broken into colored pixels. That doesn't mean the universe is made of pixels. It just means that from my monitor can create the illusion of creating any 2d image.
Another example: I can compute an integral to near infinite accuracy with numerical methods. But the true insight of what's going on only only comes from the mathematical solution of the integral.
So, I applaud the work and look forward to great new uses of CA as a tool, but have great skepticism that we've discovered the end-all method of understanding the universe.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
I don't want to start a religious war or anything, but here it is, in python, in one expression :
int('10'*3,2)
(apologies to D.A.)
barnes and noble is already out of stock on this book. amazon already had 14 day shipping period on it. so how fast do you think it will be until the booksellers are slashdotted?
I was thinking of how to intentionally fail my drug test... It would make a good memoir story someday.
So its rule 30 is it?
In order to get 42 to be the meaning of life, universe and everything, we'd have to switch to base seven?
Seven? Is this reasonable? Could someone please check these calculations!
I find this statement absolutely fascinating. It's a common problem that I run into with undergrad physics majors at the university who forget (I mean no offence to anyone in particular, so please don't take this as such) that physics just uses math to model the real world, and that the electron, positron, etc are just constructs used to describe a phenomenon that we observe.
A few of my friends who study string theory and M-Theory were describing to me the wonders of string theory and how everything can be reduced to wave in membranes and string, and so on. They said to me, "The universe is made up of strings and membranes." They felt it was so simple, and that they would have a theory to explain everything that exists... This is until I looked at them and said...
"What are the strings and membranes made of?"
They never took the chance to think that while the equations worked for superstring theory, never realized that all of this math and artificial constructs they were learning was not actually the way things were, just a good model or approximation to how things are, mostly used to predict future events (to build machines that don't explode for example.
While superstring theory (if successful) will help us create a more complete model of the universe that can be used to predict future events, there will likely still be unanswered questions, as it is just a model of the universe, our representation of the universe.
These cellular automaton theories that have been raised by this young genius, are just another way to model the universe, and the question remains for him,
"What system is the automaton running on?"
So, we are left with a simple conclusion. cellular automaton are fascinating mathematical constructs, that can hypothetically be used to simulate many things, but like the author said:
So if his model cannot supply an effective way to know the consequences of the rules, or even statistically guess at the consequences, then perhaps it's not as useful as we (or he) believe(s).
(Please do not take this as offensive, I am just trying to give the perspective of a student studying pure mathematics, physics, computer science and psychology, not trying to pick a fight. This is all IMHO)
:-) I think a quote I heard from a great mathematician fits well here:
"May the mathematics I study and produce never have application in the real world."
Cellular automatons are fascinating mathematical recreations, and might be able to help solve mathematical problems. If they do prove useful in future physics, I think John von Neuman and Stanislaw Ulam would be glad. Otherwise, may their math never have application in the real world, and remain a mathematical curiousity.
~ kjrose
Mathematica is a nice piece of software, but as This this letter to Salon points out, it's really just a cleaned-up reimplementation of the 30-year-old Macsyma (of which, by the way, there is a GPL'd version called Maxima available).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
From the Crackpot Index (http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html)
33. 50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions.
Sounds pretty right on to me. Many of his "ideas" can be attributed to others several years ago. Mandelbrot comes to mind. If he has all of these "new" ideas, I'd really have liked to see him DO something with them over the past 20 years (Yes, I know he was enlightened but a few years ago).
But then again, I bought the book
I haven't had time to read mandolin's comment yet, but since it's causing quite a stir I thought a few preliminary remarks would be in order. It's 2:00 a.m. and I'm lying on my back wedged between a dumpster and the back wall of the pub with a stray dog licking my face, which is eerily illuminated by my 486 notebook standing sideways. It's too early to tell if mandolin is a supporter or detractor of Wolfram, or if he has some altogether different axe to grind. One thing's for sure, though: posters in this thread will be arguing the question for minutes to come.
with all due respect, this can hardly be called a "review" if he hasn't read the book.
It should be called a post instead...
So in the end, after all of the formulas and grandstanding we are left with a fact that states the blindingly obvious - that it would require a universe to perform an accurate simulation of the universe.
Maybe Wolfram is covertly religious, and this research is designed to be handed to his deity of choice so that it can create a new universe to service his ego?
On a more serious note, I do see the intrinsic academic value in discovering whether a universe-creating mathematical formula does exist, but how this will change the nature of our science when such a formula cannot be applied to situations in the real world is beyond me.
s/automation/automaton/
I, for one, agree on both points. While the movie was entertaining, the math was ridiculous. The "magic number" was arrived at by nothing more than wishful thinking that devolved into numerology. Worse, the actual number pi has very little to do with spirals, and certainly no more to do with spirals than e and i do, so the entire name of the movie is bogus. Pointing out the prevalence in nature of fractals, the Fibonacci sequence, or the Golden Ratio would have made the movie more plausible from a mathematical standpoint.
But, again, the movie was quite good, and the soundtrack was intriguing enough that I bought it almost right away, and I probably would have even if it hadn't included a track from my favorite group, Orbital. Too bad they didn't pick a different Orbital song; P.E.T.R.O.L. is OK but not really representative of their work.
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
I ordered mine from Amazon as soon as I read the article in Wired, I'm getting my copy tomorrow. (Wed)
FunOne
See DigitalPhilosophy.org. A scientist named Edward Fredkin had formulated much the framework of looking at physics as being fundamentally an informational process.
Fredkin was the first one to postulate that information is conserved, and invented many
ways of applying cellular automata to building the framework for a new underlying theory of
physics.
Fredkin worked on this stuff long
before Wolfram started looking at it; Wolfram absorbed a lot of Fredkin's ideas in the mid 1980's, and the sad thing is that as usual he provides virtually no credit, in all of his enormous book.
You don't understand Wolfram. He is a total perfectionist when it comes to the smallest details. He had a group of about twenty people assisting him on the book. Very little of this was on the actual meat of the book. It was mostly things like layout, graphics, and fact-checking. He had a person who worked for several months just making sure everyone's name was spelled correctly. He checked out tons of different printers to find one that would meet his exacting standards. He sold the book at a price that a publishing company would not be willing to accept so that more people would buy the book. He wanted it to be perfect, and he wasn't going to get that kind of control if he went through a normal publisher. Since he had the resources of a decent sized corporation to make that happen, he did it.
Darren Aronofsky admits that the mathematics behind Pi was pulled out of his ass, given that he has only a high school education in the subject and was not looking for anything more complex than a simple, fascinating idea (which irrational numbers/golden ratio certainly are) to make a background for the movie. I am a CS major and it's one my favorite movies.
Hopefully this won't get lost in the myriad of comments, but here's a link to 122 sample pages, readable by any graphics capable browser. Especially interesting is the index.
Whether a scientific theory models reality or is reality is a philosphical not a scientific one. Are atoms real? (I never saw one.) Is evolution real? (FLAMEBAIT!!!) The ideal gas law is just a model. One can make an arguement that an ultimate theory of physics is "real," subatomic particles are "real" and people and chairs are just useful models.
That reminds me of a really bad joke.
Engineers think equations model reality.
Physicists think reality models equations.
Mathematicians don't see the connection.
While the Slashdot community is more or less renown for such stupidity, this pile of replies embodies the circlejerk mentality more than ever.
/. community just went down the shitter. It, as a whole, is far more concerned with hearing itself talk than giving this guy a well-deserved hearing.
I have never witnessed so much mental masurbation, ever, anyplace. This is a 1,300-page tome that I'm fairly not a single fscking one of the people who replied actually read. Without delving into Argument from Authority, it's written by a guy who wrote his first book at particle physics at the age of 14 and obtained his doctorate, if my memory serves, at the age of 17. Does this mean that whatever spews from his lips is universal law? No. Does it mean that maybe, perhaps, what he wrote is worth looking at before dismissing him out of hand as a kook? Yeah, maybe.
My opinion of the
Go ahead, mod this into the ground. Only karma-whores (and there are a lot more of you around than you'll admit) give a rat's ass about such a system. My copy arrives tomorrow and I'm looking forward to see if people with more to bring to the table than lipservice can do something with his theories.
My
Limekiller
From the first hundred pages or so, it doesn't seem terribly revolutionary. I read the stunning
Cellular Automata Machines by Toffoli and Margolus back when it was first issued in the late eighties, and it seemed far more exciting, and far less egomaniacal.
But, I'll continue to plow on, and see what develops. From the great review above, it does appear that it gets better soon.
Read Cellular Automata Machines, though. It's completely awesome.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I haven't read the book under review, but I thought I'd throw out
...).
...)
a few personal views and anecdotes that might shed some light on
Wolfram's personality.
Whatever other genius Wolfram may have, he surely has a genius
for PR. The incredible hype surrounding the release of
Mathematica attests to this. There is a review by Fateman on the
web worth reading. It quotes the NY Times, "... fundamentally
alters the mechanics of mathematics," and Fortune, "...it will
do, instantaneously, virtually all of applied mathematics..." I
have no doubt that one way or another, these statements
originated with Wolfram. Exaggerations of this order fall into
the category of what another reviewer called "batshit insanity."
I find some of the rhetoric of the book's promotion reminiscent
of the launch of Mathematica.
I used to get a good laugh with my mathematician friends over the
color plates in Wolfram's Mathematica book. Most of these are
bogus, in the sense that they depend mostly on the graphics
display rather than any mathematical power in the software. For
instance, there's a world map. There are also pretty polyhedra
which are nothing but displays of collections of triangles whose
coordinates were entered manually. These plates are there only
for PR purposes, to wow the casual observer.
Mathematica is a computer algebra system with some nice features.
However, it was hardly revolutionary when it was first released
in the late 1980's. It's capabilities were similar to those of
Macsyma, begun 20 years earlier, as well as a number of other
similar systems already in existence (Maple, Derive,
Mathematica was not, in my opinion, revolutionary, nor the most
advanced such system, nor the most original. Moreover, the
implementations of some of the basic algorithms (Grobner basis,
etc.) seemed to have been rather poor compared to rivals Maple
and Macsyma. Some of the functions seemed to have completely
bogus implementations (like the nth prime function). In dozen
years its been on the market, Mathematica has primarily enhanced
the user interface and improved the algorithms a bit. It has not
developed in the direction of significantly greater mathematical
power or flexibility.
From what I understand, Wolfram signed contracts with the other
original Mathematica developers giving nothing up front but
promising extravagant compensation once the business profited.
The profits did come, but Wolfram simply refused to honor the
contracts, which he then deemed too generous. I believe the
developers eventually settled on some compromise.
Wolfram Research is the only software company I know of that
seemed to refuse to acknowledge bugs. For a short time I was
sent issues of some Mathematica newsletter published by Wolfram.
What's especially ridiculous is that the newsletter ocasionally
reported on inocuous bugs. Many users of Mathematica have first
hand experience with very serious bugs that were never reported.
A friend of mine once attended one of Wolfram's presentations and
asked him what the exact semantics of the Distribute function in
Mathematica were (since the documentation seemed unclear).
Wolfram stated that he would not reveal the semantics because he
might decide to change them in the future; the only way to know
what Distribute does in any given release is to experiment.
I myself once asked Wolfram why Mathematica doesn't ship with
support for permutations and symmetric functions. I think any
algebraist (or algebraic topologist or algebraic geometer
recognizes the fundamental importance of such functions. Wolfram
likened my question to a request he'd gotton from a plumber to
build the standard pipe diameters into the program.
"I am Wolfram, I am smart. I will show you neat pictures you can make with Mathematica. [Buy it.] I am forced to conclude that I am smarter than Einstein or Newton, because... well, look at these pretty pictures I made! Can you believe they are produced by very simple instructions? Not impressed yet? Well, remember that I am very smart, and I think these things are very important, and, I mean, just look! It's very pretty! Now I will prove a theorem about Turing computability of Rule 110. And for the rest of the book, please listen to my totally unsubstantiated conjectures. You see, if you sort of squint, these pictures look like the universe, and so because of this resemblance, I cleverly realized this is how the universe was made. Don't believe me? Excuse me, but did you get the McCarhur Genius award at age 19? Didn't think so. Oh, and for good measure, I will totally ignore lots of work in biology and philosophy, and make some bold, unsubstantiated conjectures about these fields. They will go down easier when you keep in mind the magnitude of my intellect, and remind yourself that any objections you might have come from an inferior mind. Thank you."
Sounds to mee much like greg bear stuff
If he really thinks he's doing physics, his propositions will be testable, and it's up to him to provide a test that would show him right and his detractors wrong. Running a simulation is Mathematica is not a physics experiment. You would get the same results no matter what the universe was really like. Until I hear some novel predictions about blackbody radiation or the microwave background radiation or the distribution of galaxies or some such thing, I will continue to think that this "theory" is physically untestable, and no better than astrology or Freud's theory of the self.
Now, please notice that Wolfram makes no claim that this will ever produce testable resutls. This is the first sign of a sham. For more, consult the Crackpot Index and take note that this book scores higher than Pons & Fleischman.
So much great stuff on that soundtrack. Clint Mansell's stuff is great, but nothing compared with his work for the Requiem for a Dream soundtrack (also a Darren Aronofsky film). Mmm.
Learn to Play Go
I think that can be understood as "working with others", no? It's not like he first invented paper, alphabet and writing all over again before starting his work on this book. Even if his take on the subject is over 1000 pages long it can still be an opinion building on other peoples work and adding to that. What does it matter if the man himself doesn't want to give short speeches or communicate by means other than writing books?
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
This is supposed to be new? Evidently he hasnt spent much time with VB, then.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
Buy it directly from Wolfram's company here.
Okay, perhaps I was a bit harsh; I had just spent an hour reading shallow review after shallow review of Wolfram's work, and I dumped on you. Please accept my apology for the tone; I could have made my point more politely.
Slashdot tends to be a "me first, me first" forum, where erroneous articles get published with the expectation of "fixing" mistakes in a Slashback.
I come from the world of professional journalism, where people actually pay to read the words I write. A slower realm, to be sure, and not always more accurate -- but dead-tree journalism receives more respect than Internet writing, for the simple reason that web articles get published as quickly as possible with minimal depth, while print articles at least have a number of people looking them over, fixing typos and grammar and giving some sense of fact-checking.
Can we look forward to an in-depth review once you've read the book?
All about me
"But Jewish myths are exactly what destroyed Germany and what have destroyed America today" Germany is a world power!!! A most resilient people; the foremost technical country on the face this planet. They build the best cars in the world, and their rockets took man to the moon. Where they went wrong was the same mistake as US allright: they believed their own propaganda: that they were superior to others. They used the Jewish people as an excuse to support this ideology. If you examine any serious conflict where human rights have been violated you will generally find that the cause was the mistaken belief in superiority: look at the British Empire, the Japanese in China, the US everywhere....all the same: a mistaken belief in innate superiority, based on some strange notion of national or divine right. There is no such thing as a White Race: there is just a Human Race; we are ALL part of the same race.... Europeans have more in common with West Africans, than West Africans have with East Africans: skin pigment results from a small subset of genetic material, and is not in any way the significant element in human phenotype. Personally I dont care what religion Einstein advocated; I just know that he had insights in areas of science that I could never have and he therefore has my respect.
I was about to write a small travesty on the people who read comments and claim that nobody could possibly ever have read or understood the book. A travesty because such argumentation is based on insufficient data and a bit of prejucide, for whom, I really don't know. Everybody?
Then, I thought about pointing out that egomania doesn't mean that you're wrong, or right, as some alluded to.
But in the end, I suppose there can be only one comment on a tome such as the reviewed above, through skimming:
"Interesting."
I might read if some day, but as with most books that are popular to discuss but impopular to read, I will most likely think about he concepts explained in it, but not actually read or adopt any of the conclusions. Some people do. I usually don't.
If one point of the author really is that we can only conclude reality by letting it play out (in some cases) then that is the "blindingly obvious" indeed. We already knew that we could solve it by playing out the events that are going to happen, but did we have insight into why that was, or were we simply observing and remarking? From that perspective, such a theory is a work of understanding the Why.
That's not any new kind of science. That's what science has always been.
/ Per
I went out and bought this book, read it, and say categorically that it is a waste of time. It looks like yet another boy genius has gone off the deep end full of himself.
The first clue is how he keeps claiming big discoveries and how great he is. The big discovery is...simple algorithms make complex shit. The universe is complex. So the universe must be a simple algorithm.
But of course, it probably looks like a Cellular Automata because thats what the author has been obsessively thinking about for twenty years.
There are hundreds of pages of automata output that are supposed to mean something; looks like a bunch of core dumps to me.
Oh, and he runs on and on. Most PHDs hide the irrelevance of their discoveries in diabolical symbolic swamps, but Wolfram does something new. The epitome of clarity from sentence to sentence even a child could follow, for a thousand pages saying absolutely nothing useful, but to slyly take credit for things done by others years ago.
The book could easily be a PR stunt; knowing that it will take sometime for people to read the book, they hope to cash in on the fame of the author before the jig is up.
Apology not necessary but appreciated anyway. You are obviously from the world of print and more considered thought because of your willingness to think, reflect, and yes, even change your opinions. Wow. That's not just a true rarity on /., its a true rarity anywhere. I salute you.
If you read the rest of the review, it's pretty clear he's been through the book in as much depth as could be expected in the time available, given the amount and complexity of the material. I'd say the reviewer put at least as much work and thought into analyzing the work as the usual /. review. JMHO.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
I bought the book, and have gone through a great much of it. The ideas he is proposing are not new, but many of his examples and proofs are. What is truly interesting is that he did not follow the normal paths to publication (ie. journal articles/papers) but decided to write an all inclusive book. The fact that this book reads so easily is probably the most noteworthy feature. IMHO, read it, or as much of it as you can bear, because it's very likely that this is a one of a kind peice of work.
said with a "I am hans, this is Franz" intonation and accent.