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Stephen Wolfram Radio Lecture
Stephen Wolfram, subject of much discussion here, once known solely as the creator of Mathematica, now also known as the author of A New Kind of Science (/. review here), gave a lecture at Boston University this past spring on that book's subject matter. The audio of the lecture was broadcast this evening on the program World of Ideas on WBUR-FM out of Boston. If you don't live in the Boston area, if you missed the program, or if like me you were listening in your car while driving and found that two activites incompatible, the hour-long recording is also available for download in RealMedia format.
Can anyone provide a link to a Speex encoded copy (or .ogg, .mp3) for those of us who won't touch RealPlayer?
There are several deaf persons in the world, who are interested in Stephen Wolfram's ideas.
However, as long as the lecture exists only as audio stream, its gems of wisdom will remain forever out of reach of the deaf in the world.
AARRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!
My understanding from reading the book and looking at all of the images he includes is that the number of columns is essentially infinite but for obvious reasons only a finite number of columns can be shown at any one time. In the book you will notice that he will show a zoomed in image of a CA with maybe 25 columns and 25 iterations but the zoomed out version of that CA with 100 iterations is shown with 100 columns. Sometimes he also seems to show just a vertical slice of the real CA in order to demonstrate its properties but I have a pretty strong feeling that the image width was not the same as the simulation width.
Make any sense?
This stuff is like 40 years old. Older than Unix (30 year old OSes are fine, 31 year old ones well...).
I used to create two colonies of cells which after a certain modification would start firing moving structures at each other destroying each others sections. Sometimes bridges were built. I had one where cells seemed to patrol the border like a marquee (in reality they weren't moving, the cells simply progressed in the same decaying states). For the majority of situations, these patrols prevented incoming bodies from destroying the structures they were seemingly protecting.
We don't need a new kind of science. We need a level playing field that allows anyone to research without the kind of elitism that infuriates just the kind of people that cause independent groups to degenerate into cliques and feuds often found in the Free Energy, Cold Fusion, and Perpetual Machine cults.
We need a new approach at problem solving. Running a hundred experiments that make no new predictions is not science. Show me a laptop powered by water and I'll drop a dime into the donation cup.
If anything this stuff simply says that when things change they may stay the same. We program using code that behaves the same way at all times.
Suppose code frangments changed in ways that valid execution strings were still created, but rather than taking up many gigs of space you would call a timer to capture a certain snapshot and rearrange the code to perform some other work.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.