Wolframania

An Anonymous Coward writes "The New York Times has had a couple of articles about Stephen Wolfram in the last couple of weeks. Is he self-aggrandizing or brilliant? Or both? And is God a software engineer?" I thought our reader-contributed review of ANKOS was quite good.

Comments

SW's 256 autometa

[ajs]

He uses a classification of 256 particular 2D autometa for a lot of the examples in the book that's kind of interesting. I took the time to write some code for it to explore the various permutations. It's CGI-based and it generates a png or jpeg image, so just throw it in your cgi-bin and check it out. The comments list the various options you can send it.

Re:Anyone read it yet?

[donnacha]

or do you end up with that odd "cold fusion" feeling of being fed a bucket of horse crap?

Or, indeed, a multi-dimensional containment field of horse crap.

Re:Praise, either way...

[fatphil]

"It's too bad that more science isn't delivered this way."

Written by S. Wolfram,
Peer reviewed by noone,
Edited by S. Wolfram,
Published by S. Wolfram's company.

That's not the best route for 'science' to take in its delivery.

Having said that, I think one comment that seems to be applicable is the ancient "both new and interesting; that which is interesting isn't new, and that which is new isn't interesting" style quote. He's very bad ad giving credit to those who did so much before he was even in nappies.

FP.

Re:Anyone read it yet?

[Moriarty]

I read as much of it as I could stand. The thing that irked me even more than when he claims that complexity theory has been languishing, since he stopped publishing, was his excessive use of the word 'so-called'. There's the 'so-called Fibonacci Numbers', the 'so-called Game of Life', and the 'so-called prime numbers'. Are we supposed to think that the prime numbers are not really the prime numbers? Or is Wolfram writing some kind of giant patent application.

Painful as it was, I read most of the book just to make sure I wasn't missing anything. The truth is that he hasn't had a useful idea in the past 15 years. The rest of it is either just wanking, like his speculations on how the laws of physics could be generated by a CA - pure speculation with no way of using his ideas to solve any real problems. Other times he's just plain wrong, such as his idea that natural selection is not the cause of life complexity.

His reasoning is pretty flimsy going something like this:

1. One-dimensional CA are as complex as anything produced by two or more dimensions (he shows a one dimensional cross section of the Game of Life and it looks sort of like his beloved Rule 110 CA which is all he needs for proof. Three or more dimensional CA's are not discussed, since he can't print them in his book)
   
2. 1D CA's can only be set up that emulate a small set of patterns. This is refered to as following contraints.
   
3. Therefore, everything in nature must be fundamentally simple. There is no way for things to be developed that can follow predefined constraints, and hence natural selection has no ability to optimise organisms, and all life on earth is just stuff that was thrown together any kind of mutants you put together would be just as viable, the brain works the same way, yada yada yada.
   

I'm going to be sick. I'm glad I returned it, and please don't get me started on the notes!

Re:Has anyone here ever heard...

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Isn't it possible that he's such a unique guy that he doesn't fit any kind of mold you're aware of?

Of course it's possible. It's also possible that he's a complete crackpot who, by dint of owning a publishing company, gets to blare his name across the ether.

Luckily, after millenia of history and centuries of struggle, we've managed to evolve a system that -- much more often than not -- functions to separate the truly original and productive thinker from the truly original and marginal nutcase. It's a system that, amazingly, allows us to make confident statements about things of which we cannot have direct knowledge and that provides relatively surefire ways to establish tests to enhance that confidence.

That system of course is the system of peer review matched with rigorous experiment, coupled to independent replication of significant results.

Since the scientific system excludes certain types of claims and certain ways of making claims, it logically runs the risk of excluding the bona fide true revolutionary.... Yet in truth it does not seem to do that all that often. If a result is radical and useful, it eventually works its way into the community. Einstein's theories were nothing short of the demolition of the prevailing, overwhelmingly successful Newtonian worldview. But he made that revolution within the system, and the system accommodated it.

Too few people appreciate the astounding success and use that follows from a simple, oft-misunderstood fact: Science is not about "discovering truth". It's about quantifying ingorance ... bounding the unknown so as to make it slightly more comprehensible.

In science we don't know all that much, compared to the vast possibilities of the Universe. But what we know, we know well.

The metaphor for God

[gilroy]

Is God a software engineer? Not any more -- or any less -- than He is a watchmaker.

Here's the overriding truth of worldviews and metaphors: For at least the past five hudnred years, we in the West have taken the dominant mode of industry and "explained" both human consciousness and the Godhood in terms of it.

First, of course, industry was agriculture... and God was basically a farmer, creating and tilling the Earth, making it ripe.

Then we came upon clockworks. (Too many miss the deep pyschological impact that the idea of time-keeping had upon the world.) Nice orderly systems that run more or less regularly, mimicking the order seen in, say, the motion of planets. And here, of course, God is the ultimate watchmaker.

The Age of Steam comes next and now God is the ultimate civil enginner. The Universe is a vast and complicated -- but ultimately comprehensible -- machine. It's made of discrete little bits that fall into recognizable types. If we understand the types and how they interact, we can reverse-engineer the machine.

Now we're in the Age of Information. The rising dominant archetype is the digital computer, revolutionizing our world the way that the steam engine did the 1700s. It almost goes without saying that of course some people are going to see digital computers in everything -- even the deepest bits of the Universe -- and so of course someone is going to claim God is the ultimate software engineer.

My impression is that these metaphors reveal less about God than they do about us... we don't come any closer to understanding God through them, but we might -- if we pay attention -- come closer to understanding how we understand ourselves.