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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?
I suggest seeing pi if you like this story.
Great soundtrack too.
Trolls, it must be cool to be that bored.
"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)
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.
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.
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).
...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."
From the introduction to Bit String Physics:
Seastead this.
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!
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.
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).
Guess I don't need to buy it now...
Pfft!
I could have done it in 2 Lines with Perl!
This
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
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."
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!"
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!!!!
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.
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."
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
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.
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
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 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.
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
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."
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?
Newton didn't publish, but he did communicate his work to colleagues and friends.
Wiles worked in isolation, but people knew what he was working on. When he thought he had finished, he submitted to peer review, and guess what? An error was found. Less than a year later, and with the aid of colleagues, the error was fixed.
You yourself say that Heisenbergs best work was his PhD work. Hmmm. Work done as a student. Under the review of professors.
New and exciting work usually is unpopular and met with skepticism, but that is part of the process. It is what separates the good, novel work form the lunatic work. If you don't submit your work to peer review, how will it be determined when that work is valid? And how will you avoid wasting countless hours on work with errors? After all, isn't it true that "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow"?
Wolfram hasn't submitted to peer review. And now that he has forsaken this key aspect of the scientific process for many years, no one wants to play catch up to find out if his work is worth anything. And I don't blame them.
"I like to wear big boy pants."
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
``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?
I think you misunderstand what was meant by that phrase. He wasn't saying that phrase applies to everything, he meant it applied specifically to Wolfram's book. That Wolfram put a lot of stuff in his book, and that the stuff that is true has all been shown before. And that the new stuff in the book simply wasn't true.
I hope that isn't the case though, I am looking forward to reading it. It won't be as fun if I believe it to be a load of crap.
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.
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.
Tesla
Kevin Fox
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.
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.
Wiles did present the paper, then the errors were found but by the collegue he had checking it. But the idea of the proof was correct. I never stated that peer review was bad, just that in certain circumstances, revolutionary result require unconventional methods.
And Wolfram may not have submitted to Peer reviewed journals (as Newton did not) but he did communicate the work to collegues and friends (see here).
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
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)???
Hopefully the pressures of changing the world don't drive Wolfram to drill a hole in his head.
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
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.
Wolfram is the first to admit that there are several areas he is clueless about. Somewhere I read that one of his office workers mentioned they were going to a Super Bowl party and he wanted to know what that was. Of course, he IS from England...
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.
Don't try comparing Newton and Wolfram. Newton had a vast circle of friends in the scientific and political community. He held posts at two universities. Everyone knew what he was working on, so in that sense there was plenty of review. And although he was severely criticised for some of his ideas, he stayed in the community, kept pushing his ideas (orally), and was eventually vindicated.
Wolfram is a recluse, and probably a cracked nut. He has no need for the scientific community, and they apparantly have no need for him (though his software is pretty damn cool). His ideas haven't been shunned like Newton's Optics were; he simply feels no need to share them. He is closer to Howard Hughes than Isaac Newton.
"I like to wear big boy pants."
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.
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.
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.
Of interest also is Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel winning physicist (particles, the eightfold way, and the actual discovery of some theoretical particles, Quarks in particular) and Santa Fe Institute co-chair, and perhaps, just maybe, still on to something. Eventually.
His Current focus is the science of simplicity and complexity. He calls it "Plectics". While he has some of the most remarkable credentials possible, the jury's still out on his current work...
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
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.
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 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."
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.
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
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