Slashdot Mirror
Wolfram's New Kind of Science Now Online
gotscheme writes "When Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica fame self-published A New Kind of Science in 2002, he raised the suspicions of many in scientific communities that he was taking advantage of a lot of other people's work for his sole financial gain and that he was going against the open nature of academia by using restrictive copyright. Yesterday, Wolfram and company released the entire contents of NKS for free on the Web (short registration required). Perhaps Wolfram is giving back to the scientific community; perhaps it is simply clever marketing for a framework that is beginning to gain momentum. For any matter, the entire encyclopedic volume is online, and this appears to be a positive step for scientific writing."
The idea that the universe is the product of the combinatorial effects of different combinations of events seems neither unique nor unexpected.
I know this will probably be modded as a troll, but could it be that NKS is nothing more than a computer-science primer for physicists?
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
The work is almost completely without merit -- a Godel, Escher, Bach for idiots.
Wolfram doesn't care, he's made a nice pile from it, generated some nice PR for himself; refused all peer review; got a bunch of sycophantic reviews -- largely from non-scientists -- took his short term profit, then bailed.
If he was poor, he'd've been dismissed as a kook, but the rich can lay on some nice junkets, so they get treated as genius, even when their ideas are rotten.
Move along.
If I recall correctly, he published his first scientific paper at the age of 15, and had received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech by the age of 20.
Not too bad.
Or perhaps the book itself was too expensive for any sane person to plop down the money to purchase it.
ANKOS is not a groundbreaking book, and it's conclusions (that all creation is fundamentally programmed into it) is specious. He is adamant that there is no God which created everything, yet he points to artificial order which could only be created by an intelligent designer.
He totally discounts the view that these patterns are the result of accepted scientific theories like evolution and geology and says that evolution and geology are directed by the patterns. It's a completely inside-out view of the universe and despite its obvious attraction for pseudo-intellectual navel gazers, the book and its contents are neither anything new nor anything that could be construed as vaguely scientfic.
I have been pwned because my
...same as the old science. Anyone have the no-registration link?
"Perhaps Wolfram is giving back to the scientific community; perhaps it is simply clever marketing for a framework that is beginning to gain momentum.
Perhaps he's trying to make himself look like less of an asshole.
I cant access the website here at school, TIES for some reason blocks it (pornogrophy), could someone tell me what lisence this is posted on?
If its the Commons license, then, ugh, cool and stuff...
... because printing out the book would cost much more than the book itself.
A forum at the site for peer review would be nice. Then the issues of credit for work and contentious elements of the theory could be debated dynamically and publicly. Of course maybe it exists already. Can't get to the site at the moment.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I've been to a lecture by Wolfram and it was disappointingly low-level. He touched on many interesting subjects but unfortunately didn't delve deep enough to make the lecture really very worthwhile. All in all it seemed like a marketing gimmic to sell his book and software.
The only good part about the whole thing was the completely misguided people asking him truly bizarre questions at the end of the lecture. It was really amusing to see him struggle to answer some truly retarded questions.
Prof. Eugene Wigner said it best in his evaluation of a Professor giving a talk at Princeton: "Well Sir that talk was certainly New and Interesting, however what was New is not Interesting and what was Interesting was not New." I think that certainly applies to this book.
He may be a smart guy, but I think he might just be recycling old material and calling it the Next Big Thing (TM). Again, I won't find out unless this book catches on, because most of my book purchases are by word of mouth or by trusted source (sorry, Slashdot, you do not fit into this category), and if it's going to get to me and my small circle of friends and acquiantences, it had better start selling.
But good luck to the guy. At least he's writing a book, rather than writing all of his prose in Slashdot comments!
I wonder if Wolfram has come up with a CA to describe the massive slashdotting he is currently receiving...
Down, down, down. The Red knight's goin' down.
There was a lot of hype when this book came out, and then some backlash. The $45 plus to get it is a big barrier to jump for the average science junkie, let alone 'core geek. Getting it online for free kills that problem. As for the questions raised in the book, and more so the questions _about_ the material, a little peer review never hurt. Now anyone can access this work and start judging!
I remember THAT book. That's the book where Wolfram compares himself to Newton in the first paragraph of the introduction.
Wolfram is a great math pro, but the only way he could help Newton is to shine his shoes.
It's like the von Neumann bottleneck, where 10 % of the code is run 90 % of the time. Truth be told, the REAL von Neumann bottleneck is that only 10 % of computer scientists are even 90 % as smart as von Neumann.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
I hear Wolfram's Science.NEW only runs on the English-language platform.
Props to Wolfram for this, but it looks like clever marketing- as far as I can tell, you can't, say, download a pdf of a chapter; you pretty much have to go page by page. So on a practical level, it's a big ad.
Also, you need Mathematica to run the programs.
So, if you get hooked by the online text, Wolfram can count on 1 book sale, and maybe 1 Mathematica license (if, like me, you don't study/work somewhere with a site license).
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
A cellular automaton is simply a description of a discrete differential equation. Since physical laws are described in terms of differential equations to start with, it's not surprising that a cellular automaton can model a physical process.
So what's the deal? Outside of Wolfram's ego, of course.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
As someone who owns and has read that book, I say it was definitly worth the money even if it was just a collection of other people's work. The point is ANKOS complete and insightfull. It actually says something specific, which is more then we can say about plenty of books hailed by the noobs. I think the man deserves some compensation for the work put forth even if it was only collecting and copywriting he saved me from a long journey to learn from his insights.
That reminds me of the time that I cryed when trying to install Debian. I never thaught that computer can make a man cry.
Maybe one day I'll get to install it without running away like a little girl.
Anyone who is a visitor of Wolfram MathWorld or ScienceWorld will recognize the invaluable contribution that Wolfram has made to the scientific community. From a personal perspective without MathWorld sometimes I would be completely lost...
Wolfram's broad sharing of his work, while still limited (you still need an internet connection, at least momentarily, to save or print it) is a terrific step forward in sharing information with a broader audience that may be interested in his work. I was one of the purchasers of his book when it was first published, but it was expensive enough (even while heavily subsidized by Wolfram himself) that not everyone who was interested could find a copy.
By publishing on-line, Wolfram does something courageous as well - rather than simply submitting his work to academia and using their vetting procedure, he's opening up his work for criticism from a much, much wider body of critics. Forums like /. give us the opportunity to discuss the merits of his work - by the end of today, there will be many critiques of his work on this page, and everyone who takes the time to read those will come away from the discussion with many different perspectives that they might never have stumbled upon.
It's true that Wolfram has his own agenda to push here, and it might be compared to self-publishing a newspaper that only focuses on what you want, but one could argue that about nearly anything that's published, and I'd rather have the material disseminated so that I can read it and come to my own conclusions.
It's currently suffering A New Kind of Slashdotting.
Considering that Stephen refused for public discourse and review of an alledged scientific work and now is whining that his critics are worng..
Maybe this work shoulde be burned in the fireplace where it belongs
Don't Tread on OpenSource
heh. just go read the amazon.com reviews.
the book has nothing to do with science and everything to do with Wolfram navel gazaing about his own brilliance.
go and read a few chapters, you will see that every second paragraph contains the sentences " I discovered this, and I discovered that, and I'm oh so fuking brilliant" types of statements.
this is nothing more than the masturbation of a pathetic adult male with a very high I.Q. and very low emotional development.
he truly and desperately wants to believe that he is the next einstein.
pathetic.
he raised the suspicions of many in scientific communities that he was taking advantage of a lot of other people's work for his sole financial gain and that he was going against the open nature of academia by using restrictive copyright.
I think the thing that offended most people is that Wolfram seemed to be taking credit for other people's ideas. And also, he comes off as being tremendously pompous. He hid away for ten or more years, then comes out with a book claiming, as per the title, to have invented an entirely new way to solve problems. What's he got? Algorithms and cellular automata.
I say, RTFB (Book). What!? You haven't? It's too damn big? Well go read it and THEN come back and complain.
On the other hand, I think that people's attitude toward his work is not a problem of the merit of the his work. Rather, it is the way he seemed so self-important when pointing out something that seems deceptively simple that many people have covered before (Cellular Automata).
The universe is not governed by vastly complicated equations wrought by the human mind. And Wolfram pointing that out simply offended people who believed otherwise.
Please take time to read the reviews on the Amazon link.
Whilst I'll attempt to read the online version I'll not be buying a copy.
Possibly after this sort of feed back Wolfram decided that on-line is the only way to get folks to read it.
Worst
For a change, this is actually a legitimate question. Having browsed through a friend's copy (thank god I didn't splash out for one of my own) I have come to the conclusion that it is "whack". A colossal exercise in vanity publishing, nothing else (except for the gratuitious advertising for his own software). Pretty pictures though.
I wish I could find the original source, but the best review I saw of the book was along the lines of "It is a scary example of what happens when serious megalomania is combined with bad sh*t insanity."
I saw Wolfram speak shortly after the book came out, and it was almost laughable. He made a sequence of sweeping generalizations and, so far as I could tell, backed none of them up.
That said, there is some useful stuff in the book (albeit, not all contributed by Wolfram) but it is a beautiful example of why the standard process of peer review and sharing work with your colleagues is a good idea. Wolfram did neither of these things and the book is the poorer for it.
That's the book that was described by one researcher as: "A rare blend of monster raving egomania and utter batshit insanity" which when I first read it made me laugh out loud. I haven't read the book so I don't know how accurate it is.
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
"suspicions of many in scientific communities that he was taking advantage of a lot of other people's work for his sole financial gain "
,yes , but so what? Doesn't that describe virtually every non fiction book (and a lot of fiction books too) every published? Everyone
Umm
derives their knowledge from what has been discovered or created by people before. Any scientist who could write a science book WITHOUT referencing
other peoples ideas or work would probably deserve a clutch of nobel prizes.
I often look to Anonymous Cowards for respected peer review.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Wolfram probebly thought he could do the same trick with celular automata as Einstein with the theory of relativity: rewrite a lot of stuff without references and everybody will believe it is original and a work of genius?
-- Qu'est-ce que la propriété intellectuelle? It is thought control.
Perhaps Wolfram is giving back to the scientific community; perhaps it is simply clever marketing for a framework that is beginning to gain momentum. For any matter, the entire encyclopedic volume is online, and this appears to be a positive step for scientific writing.
Nope. This is a positive step for scientific writing.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
Well,
.02.
I understand everyone has to make a living. When I read his work, I was interested in his unique view that complexity arises from simplicity and that he had combined a large field into a view of complexity all his own.
The insights are fascinating, especially the ability to build computational systems with simple repeating rules....(i.e. multiplication tables...etc.) from graphical representations.
The biggest disappointment is that he didn't provide enough practical research in testable form in the book to double check his experiments, some of them very heavily numerical in composition, which would require a lot of programming to confirm.
My biggest problem is that he uses a $1500-$3000 dollar Mathematics tool, he says he invented himself, that he profits from, to confirm his research.
That I do find a bit hard to swallow, including the license required to run Mathematica.
Science shouldn't operate on the principle of PAY to play. Anyone should have access to any and all information for free.
The labor to create it however, should not be free, and we have plenty of avenues in the free market place to do that just like Open Source Software companies have shown such as RedHat.
The book does give a very large impression that Mr. Wolfram discovered these things all by himself...you have to follow the booknotes to find out who's shoulders he is standing on.
In the end, he is sort of like a Newton who is focusing the worlds attention on the fundamentals of complex systems theory and what it is, and how we can use it to improve the scientific method. He is using a large amount of research though that many have contrinuted too.
My
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Well I got news for you: most of you also said Einstein was full of it and then said the same of Heisenberg. Just look under your fingers to see the proof these guys' theories at work. All this kind of people are saying is that _themselves_ are incapable of understanding the conceptual change, and that by consequence nobody else will either. This is a lot like saying you don't understand Pythagoras' theorem and then going on to say it's crap. I have to say how much I really admire those people *not*!!
When the book was published I heard alot of talk about the author. I personally never knew anything about him until this book (well I heard in passing he created Mathimatica). I am no expert in the field, but the book was still an interesting read. I do not believe a million pages were necessary to express what he is saying. If you read the first half of the book you will get the point of what is saying. Then use the other half to heat your house for the rest of the winter. He did talk about himself alot in the book, which I did not appreciate. It is a "BIG" book. Note to author -- Let history make you famous, grrrr. Now Google is going to index this book and see how he refers to himeself a million times and get ranked number one for the given topic.
Wolfram = German for tungsten
For a second I thought the wolfman was making a come back.
Totally ready for the weekend.
And when can we expect the announcement of his new book, co-written with Viktor Hart, full time mad scientist and re-animator?
From one of the links discussing Wolfram's use of others' work:
This really highlights what a megalomaniac Wolfram is. While he may be remembered after his death, I imagine it will be for his insufferable ego, not for his scientific achievements.
Oh, and regarding Mathematica: its use by students should be banned until they are able to outperform it in terms of mathematical sophistication. Its overuse in universities is leading to an intellectually-stunted generation.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Isn't anyone going to post the whole text here?
"...he raised the suspicions of many in scientific communities that he was taking advantage of a lot of other people's work for his sole financial gain and that he was going against the open nature of academia by using restrictive copyright."
"Perhaps Wolfram is giving back to the scientific community; perhaps it is simply clever marketing for a framework that is beginning to gain momentum."
So what organization will Random House et al cobble together, dress up in flight jackets and use to break into every nerdy teenagers bedroom? What happens when the RIAA thugs and the Book thugs show up at the same place at the same time? Do tehy fight for dibs on the kids piggy bank? Now that I'd like to see.
Even a genius can let his ego lead him to idiocy.
I only had to spend about 5 minutes flipping through ANKOS before finding a truly offensive passage. He claimed that, previous to him, mathematicians believed that certain types of behavior of functions were not possible, but that his proofs show that they are possible. But mathematicians had shown that the behavior was possible and had given examples (forgive me for forgetting the precise details). His claim was wrong and easily checkable. But in his arrogance, he didn't bother to check it. This is an insult to the mathematicians whom he essentially libeled.
He probably talked to very few people while writing this book. That way, he could claim credit for all of it-- after all, who did Newton work with? But science and math is best done within a network of other researchers. If you don't, you might wind up with stupidity like ANKOS.
... quite the looker
My mind is falling apart!! Agh!! This is SLASHDOT for Pete's sake! I can't take the differing opinions!!! >explodes<
Seriously though, who's right and who's wrong? Not everyone can be right!
Or does getting modded up not necessarily delineate truth?
Actually, Einstein and Heisenberg was highly respected in their time, and their work quickly appreciated (relatively speaking) by the scientific community at large, considering that Einstein did nothing less than rewrite the basic laws of physics.
Nope, the criticism of Wolfram's work is justified.
The page appears to be slashdotted. Could someone post the entire contents of A New Kind of Science to Slashdot so I can read it?
From the one come the two from the two come the three and from the three come the ten thousand.
So the Tao Te Ching covered this before western science had advanced to the pound of feathers pound of lead which differentiation system.
For people who missed it the one being the Tao, the two being yin and yang or a binary system, the three being simple rules and 10,000 is just old Chinese for an infinite amount. So Wolfram is right on but not breaking any ground and could have gotten the same results by meditating for ten years facing a wall. I just like to plug the Tao again for a second by pointing out that its the only religion/philosophy that also covers quantum uncertainty and particle physics. They also covered the raw food diet, the Atkins diet and just about every other aspect of science and health.
1. There is a short path from genius to crackpot.
2. I see the predicatable "they laughed/scoffed at Einstein, too" responses. And of course, they laughed at Bozo the Clown as well. Proves nothing.
3. Does Wolfram's solution of a hammer turn every problem he sees into a nail?
4. They said that Hemingway was a pretty mediocre war correspondent in the ETO. Yeah, he wrote beautiful stuff, but it was all about him.
5. People who tell me how smart they are make me uncomfortably sad for them.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
aside from the debate on the content, the site itself is well-made. I hope other books in the public domain gets treated this way, and allow public forum over the chapters and pages.
It's amazing how they're getting a slashdotting but still up. OK it's slow as hell; but it's still working. Don't see that too often.
Sales of the book don't matter to Wolfam -- Mathematica is MUCH more lucrative. The book is just an advert for his software.
Believe it or not there are open source computer algebra systems! Two that I'm familiar with are Maxima and PARI-GP (sorry, don't have a link at the moment). Maxima is general purpose, while PARI-GP is mostly about number theory.
Maxima's history is interesting. It is based on the source code (Lisp!) of the Macsyma system developed at MIT circa 1970-1980. Mathematica is essentially a rewrite of Macsyma with very slightly different syntax. You know what they say about imitation.
He may be a smart guy, but I think he might just be recycling old material and calling it the Next Big Thing (TM)
.
This is quite true, notwithstanding the fact that he is precisely the source for much of this old material in the first place ! Wolfram is really a strange guy, and he does have weird ideas (especially on evolution), but at the end of the day he really started something deep.
Wolfram did not invent cellular automata, but he was the first one to study them in a scientific way. And he did find interesting things (papers here - caution, big hairy theoretical physics maths inside, but the central idea is quite clear)
First: very simple rules (a 1-D cellular automaton in which each cell depends only on its current state and that of each of its neighbour) can lead to arbitrarily complex behaviours regardless of initial conditions. But this is not the really interesting thing.
Second: Possible behaviours for a simple cellular automaton can fall in 4 categories: frozen (nothing changes), periodic, chaotic (measurably chaotic behaviour in which no recognizable pattern appears), and most importantly "complex": patterns emerge, propagate through the system, interact together in complex and non-trivial ways. Conway's game of Life is the most famous exemple of a class-IV cellular automaton, but Wolfram found a few much simpler ones.
There is something deep there. You probably heard about "chaos theory". Well what Wolfram says is that this is not the really cool stuff. If you think of it, chaos is just as boring as frozen, non-changing states. If you modify something in a frozen state, well your modification either stays there forever, or is immediately swallowed into oblivion. In the chaotic state, any modification you make will instantaneously disappear in the general whirlwind.
But there is a small zone between these two extremes, in which a modification may give rise to patterns, structures, complex bursts of information that appear, grow, propagate and interact. This is what Doyne Farmer and Chris Langton later called the "Edge of Chaos", where interesting stuff can happen : an actual phase transition, often governed by a small set of parameters (possibly just one), between boring order and completely chaotic states. Around this pahase transition, interesting things can appear.
The world exist because the laws of physics are at the edge of chaos. Would the physical world be chaotic, no structure would ever appear, it would instantaneously be dissolved. In a frozen state, the universe is a black rock. Similaraly, life exists because chemistry is also on the edge of chaos. Molecules can assemble, interact in complex ways and produce order, patterns, structure.
There is something deep there. This guy, together with people like Chris Langton, Doyne Farmer, Stuart Kauffman, is one of the Founding Fathers of complexity sciences. "How do complex systems arise ? If I have a system, what are the condtions under which it can produce freeze, go straight away to chaos, or produce interesting things ? How do structures emerge in a given system ?" Take any paper by any of these four, and you immediately get into mind-boggling stuff. "Life, the universe, everything" - and it's a bit more complicated than 42.
Wolfram goes on. He (and his students) proved that even elementary cellular automaton can actually be universal Turing machines (unsurprisingly, these are class-IV automata). Thus the undecidability principle must be applied to them: you cannot guess, for a given cellular automaton, what the result will be after N iterations - or at least, you cannot do it with less calculations than it would take to actually perform these N calculations.
If such a simple thing as an elementary CA can give rise to universal computation, then universal computation and (most importantly) un
I started to read ANKOS and was turned off by what I viewed as mental masturbation. Every other sentence seemed to include the mantra 'with my new kind of science'. This vacuous tome serves as Wolfram's shrine to himself -- visions of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem 'Ozymandias' come to mind.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
I've seen a few comments from people saying they flicked through, but not one person saying they read it all.
I have to say (not having read it) that when someone says they have written something that breaks conventional wisdom, and the only response is from people saying it's rubbish EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE NOT READ THE ENTIRE BOOK, I begin to mistrust the views of anyone saying it's rubbish.
If you haven't read the thing, having any definitive view on it is bogus. Trying to convince others that your view is correct is even more bogus. The closest we've got to a review is "I read a review by someone else and...." WTF? What makes you think that reviewer read it either?
And these same people say this wolfram guy is a charlaton? His critics seem worse, somehow.
... the scientologists would learn from this. some of their shit is good ...
Most crackpots develop in social isolation, but there's another breed that develop in situations of power where they isolate themselves from criticism.
Wolfram is, in my opinion, a very interesting crackpot. He paid for his circle of sycophants with his own hard work, technical and business skills. This gave him the isolation he needed to place himself in the league of Newton and Einstein without fear of contradiction.
I believe I gathered everything of value from his massive tome in an hour at a bookstore. I recommend you buy yourself a latte at Borders and do the same. It's an hour well spent, but basically if you have some solid math and CS, you'll find it a new kind of science whose depths can be plumbed in an hour.
mt
In academia there tends to be a strong bias against anyone who becomes "popular." Any academic who can write such that people who haven't studied the field for 15 years will understand will probably get labelled as a "hack" or "completely without merit" and some other unsavory adjectives, regardless of the quality of their other work. The closeted insiders that nobody's ever heard of can't stand anyone who makes it into the daylight.
I've seen this reaction across any number of technical or non-technical academic fields. Sometimes the thrashing is justified, usually it's not. But it always happens.
As someone once said: "The politics in academia are so nasty only because the stakes are so small."
A collection of reviews from actual scientists is available right here, for those who are tired reading the opinions of the uninformed.....
Make cheese not war 8:)
CAs are different from monads how? And they accuse critical theorists, etc. of intellectual masturbation....
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
MIT hosts videos of many different speakers who have come to their university. Stephen Wolfram is one of them: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/149/
Soooo, can anyone please tell me where the web form is to submit my book and get my $50 USD back? I cannot find it anywhere.
Apparantly he is working on a new ethical theory too.
It seems almost redundant, if not for the fact that so many stupid believe are oblivious to it.
I haven't read the whole book (his style is nearly insufferable at times), but the part I have read classified mathematically derived patterns according to their complexity and showed that complex patterns could be derived from fairly simple processes. If this is correct, the connection seems to be that physical laws can be represented by differential equations but the processes that generate them could be discrete recursive processes rather than the continuous ones that are (?) implied by the diff. equations, and that the recursive equations are easier to develop computationally.
Of course, this doesn't seem new - I thought that other people had shown connections between recursive functions and diff. equations. I haven't read far enough to see if his mathematical systems are shown applicable to more general systems (not just that they are analogous to, but that similar processes are actually operating). It might be good if it defines a useful construct to explore these pattern, or if it defines them well enough to understand why some patterns are complex and others derived from similar rules are not, but I haven't read far enough yet.
Having a peer review after publication is not my understanding of how peer review works.
For a scientific paper, one submits it to a highly repected journal. The editors choose folks in the same field to review the paper.
If they say the paper has flaws or is uninteresting, it doesn't get published.
If they publish it, and other folks build upon the ideas and cite the paper in their published, peer-reviewed papers, it is recognized as being
a valuable contribution to science.
This is my understanding of how scientists.
Publishing it as a book without peer review and then hoping it will be recognized later by the scientific community shows an unwillingness to risk not being published.
We cannot tell if it would have been published by a scientific journal subject to peer review.
Some may wish to wade through the ideas of hundreds of "cranks" to find the occasional genius with groundbreaking ideas.
I do not. I let the scientific community to weigh in on this.
To each his own.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
Clearly, most people don't have the time to read such a tome. Here's the gist:
"Sure, this has been presented several times before with more concision and elegance, *I* slapped in a couple of catch-phrases, claimed all the credit, and put years and YEARS of blood, sweat and toil into my simulations--oh, my beautiful simulations. O! The patterns! The joy! And some day, when the world has succumbed to my greatness, I will invite all of you to join together to build a Pyramid to your Pharoah--yes! A computer that will generate the Great Pattern--my finest simulation of all! Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!!"
The sheer size of this book is pretty much undermining many opportunities for useful review. The prospective reader is expected to make a pretty substantial time commitment just to evaluate the work. If after a hundred pages or so the book doesn't have the ring of truth or any signs of rigor, many of us are loathe to commit to digesting the rest of it. If Wolfram had released this in a long series of journal articles like a normal scientist, he would get a lot more reasoned feedback, and his early results, if they survived the analysis of his peers, might have actually found fruitful application by now.
Which is not to excuse dismissing the text without reading it. I merely think that that the format of this book will make it much less likely to be taken seriously any time soon.
I'm not exactly the biggest fan of digital books, so perhaps a grain of salt or two is in order, but, um, what's so great about this, as compared to the print version?
The book is in print at $45, and probably available used for considerably less. 1200-odd pages of New Kind of Science, even printed at $.03 a page is still a $36 printout. And it's not bound.
Why not just get the print book?
Skeptic Magazine wrote a great article on Wolfram and his claims. After reading it, I got the impression Wolforam is a fraud, but the article didn't explicitly say that:
Skeptic Magazine Article Link
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I gave NKOS my best shot & made it through about 100 pages. I couldn't decide if it was a work of genius, or the equivalent of someone staring at clouds & seeing stuff. The notes at the back of the books were very interesting, more so than the book itself, but the font size was too small to read comfortably.
I seem to remember that Nikola Tesla, another loner genius, exhibited very strange behavior as he got older (what many people would call insanity).
...nice not to be disappointed.
Anyway, the new book is being held up by his new CEO, who apparently does not like the book's chapter with instructions for ritual slaughter.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
The major new thing in ANKOS is that it takes seriously the proposition that CA is the mechanism underlying the laws of nature.
Others have thought that - I know I've thought it since being exposed to Conway's game of life, and I'm sure I'm not original in that. That's similar to the way school kids commonly noticed that the continents sort of fit together, long before the idea of continental drift was proposed and defended and eventually considered proven among serious scientists.
But for those who say Wolfram is contributing nothing new, I suggest you skip forward to chapter 9 - Fundamental Physics - maybe even skip to the section on space. I'm not saying he's right - just that he has developed the "CA implements nature" idea beyond the trivial.
Wolfram's main contribution, in the long run, may come from the fact that his attitude challenges theoreticians to disprove his thesis. To the extent he is correct, or to the extent that in considering his thesis theoreticians come up with something more correct, the book could in fact lead to a new kind of science.
And if you know anything about science or maths already, you're much better off checking out the book ``Collected Papers on Cellular Automata'' (?), ed. S. Wolfram.
Not only is there (much) more content than ANKoS, you notice that some of the papers have coauthors. And that, for a few of them, Wolfram himself was only one of many coauthors.
There is also a detailed reduction of (some) fluid mechanics to CA with a proof of equivalence. This says more (to me) about the generality of this "new" science than that whole coffeetable book taken @ once.
Maybe he could invent a New Kind of Server, one that doesn't get whacked when mentioned on /.
It's not down, but it's gasping.
And, someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but is it genius to put a gigantic 1192 page tome on the web and NOT make it a downloadable pdf, but to insist that people BROWSE it online?
(still waiting for my registration reply, maybe it'll be downloadable in there?)
-Styopa
Did anyone bother to read Joe Weiss's review on amazon? Best. Review. Ever. Posted here in its entirety:
The Emperor's New Kind of Clothes, February 28, 2003 by Joe Weiss
This review took almost one year. Unlike many previous referees (rank them by Amazon.com's "most helpful" feature) I read all 1197 pages including notes. Just to make sure I won't miss the odd novel insight hidden among a million trivial platitudes.
On page 27 Wolfram explains "probably the single most surprising discovery I have ever made:" a simple program can produce output that seems irregular and complex.
This has been known for six decades. Every computer science (CS) student knows the dovetailer, a very simple 2 line program that systematically lists and executes all possible programs for a universal computersuch as a Turing machine (TM). It computes all computable patterns, including all those in Wolfram's book, embodies the well-known limits of computability, and is basis of uncountable CS exercises.
Wolfram does know (page 1119) Minsky's very simple universal TMs from the 1960s. Using extensive simulations, he finds a slightly simpler one. New science? Small addition to old science. On page 675 we find a particularly simple cellular automaton (CA) and Matthew Cook's universality proof(?). This might be the most interesting chapter. It reflects that today's PCs are more powerful systematic searchers for simple rules than those of 40 years ago. No new paradigm though.
Was Wolfram at least first to view programs as potential explanations of everything? Nope. That was Zuse. Wolfram mentions him in exactly one line (page 1026): "Konrad Zuse suggested that [the universe] could be a continuous CA." This is totally misleading. Zuse's 1967 paper suggested the universe is DISCRETELY computable, possibly on a DISCRETE CA just like Wolfram's. Wolfram's causal networks (CA's with variable toplogy, chapter 9) will run on any universal CA a la Ulam & von Neumann & Conway & Zuse. Page 715 explains Wolfram's "key unifying idea" of the "principle of computational equivalence:" all processes can be viewed as computations. Well, that's exactly what Zuse wrote 3 decades ago.
Chapter 9 (2nd law of thermodynamics) elaborates (without reference)on Zuse's old insight that entropy cannot really increase in deterministically computed systems, although it often SEEMS to increase. Wolfram extends Zuse's work by a tiny margin, using today's more powerful computers to perform experiments as suggested in Zuse's 1969 book. I find it embarassing how Wolfram tries to suggest it was him who shifted a paradigm, not the legendary Zuse.
Some reviews cite Wolfram's previous reputation as a physicist and software entrepreneur, giving him the benefit of the doubt instead of immediately dismissing him as just another plagiator. Zuse's reputation is in a different league though: He built world's very first general purpose computers (1935-1941), while Wolfram is just one of many creators of useful software (Mathematica). Remarkably, in his history of computing (page 1107) Wolfram appears to try to diminuish Zuse's contributions by only mentioning Aiken's later 1944 machine.
On page 465 ff (and 505 ff on multiway systems) Wolfram asks whether there is a simple program that computes the universe. Here he sounds like Schmidhuber in his 1997 paper "A Computer Scientist's View of Life, the Universe, and Everything." Schmidhuber applied the above-mentioned simple dovetailer to all computable universes. His widely known writings come out on top when you google for "computable universes" etc, so Wolfram must have known them too, for he read an "immense number of articles books and web sites" (page xii) and executed "more than a hundred thousand mouse miles" (page xiv). He endorses Schmidhuber's "no-CA-but-TM approach" (page 486, no reference) but not his suggestion of using Levin's asymptotically optimal program searcher (1973) to find our universe's code.
On page 469 we are told that the simp
Education is the silver bullet.
First, I bought and tried to read the book. I read some of it. I really wanted to like it. The problem was the rather LOOOOONG WINDED style of the book. He spends way too long focusing on mundane details with no real point. Also, Dr. Wolfram insists on using his Mathematica notation instead of the lambda calculus or other accepted notation. One logician referred to his work as containing such an annoying prolix style that no could read it. Even if there were some interesting stuff, anyone with some sophistication would get sick of the book. That's the problem. I think his ideas are interesting. Some of it is original, but he's made it very hard to read. The math is sparse. It's like a book I read on Relativity by Max Born. The book tried to explain problems in classical mechanics without calculus. It used this bizarre concoction of incremental algebra. It ruined the book. It tried to make something that was "hard", too simple. Some things require mathematical sophistication. Have you ever really tried to explain relativity without math? What was a simple matrix transformation in hyperspace becomes some weird discussion of how my space and your time cross. Absolutely meaningless! Try explaining algorithm analysis or mathematical logic without math. Why do think no one (in the general public) knows who Godel is?
I like my math terse and rigourous. Stephen Wolfram made an ambitious popular science book. It's like a weird cross between Principia Mathematica and Godel, Escher, and Bach. The only real thesis I got out of the book was the Principle of Computational Equivalence, which states that if the universe were governed by simple rules (like those expressed by a cellular automata) then any calculations with those rules (thus an attempt to predict phenomena) would take as long as the actual act itself. Frankly, I think Gregory Chaitin's work in Algorithmic Information Theory has a lot more to offer. It's rigourous and answers a seemingly inverted version of PCE.
Mr. Wolfram is not a crank. Is he a pompous jackass? Yes. Did he stay out of research too long? Yes. That's the problem.
By dumb luck, I actually picked up a couple of books to read on some related stuff yesterday.
"From Complexity to Life", edited by Niels Henrik Gregersen
Gregory Chaitin, Stuart Kauffman, Paul Davies and many more
This book actually gives you some definitions in a non-technical way. Things are made simple to a point, but some thought is required.
"Feynman and Computation", edited by Anthony Hey
Ed Friedkin, John Wheeler, Marvin Minsky, and many more
It's a book about computation, physics, and what should be in ANKOS.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
Would you like to give an example of one of Wolfram's insights please? Just talking in generalities won't do.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Since when are ad hominem "refutations" modded Insightful?
I know it's nice to Play Well With Others, but there's no valid argument in the grandparent. Just finger-wanging obfuscation.
would someone close to this guy slap him in the face and tell him he is no Newton, or Galileo. not even CLOSE! this book contains NOTHING original in thought and is mostly empty egotistical rhetoric.
This isn't a review of NKS (you can do that yourself), but having access to the book in two forms is very nice.
The paper version works well on the table, couch, or water closet library. The electronic version works well for searching and quick references when away from the dead tree version.
We all are a big computer and we're becoming.. self-aware!
Well, I haven't read the entire Time Cube web site either, but I read enough to form a solid opinion.
On stereophonic equipment, the monaural sound obtained through multiple channels will enhance your listening pleasure.
I've read NKS and I found it at the same time stimulating and lacking.
The most interesting part is the demonstration of Turing completeness of rule 110. It's neat, it's smart, it's totally useless as is, requiering starting conditions for the CA that are at odds with everything else described in the first chapters (quasi-infinite strip, thousands of cells for one calculation).
I wished that, with the kind of computing power that went into producing this book, Wolfram would have tried to EXTRACT higher order rules from simple CAs, a problem CA researchers have struggled with for ages, instead of building a perfect artificial setting where 110 computes.
Maybe in volume II, in twenty years.
I see Wolfram's book as being like a really good novel, one you reread often. I feel that one day I will go back and reread ANKOS, and have further insights on what he is saying. My first read basically showed me, in a million ways, the idea of complexity arising from simple rules/algorithms - and how this applies to the real world and universe. There was much more in there, though - and I feel that I will reread it and come to understand this, as well.
I feel this book should not be read alone - one should read Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's book "Linked", as well as Kelly's "Out of Control", and perhaps Steven Johnson's "Emergence" to begin to get a more complete picture. The combination of knowledge in all of these books, taken together, I honestly believe could lead to some very exciting developments across all branches of science and society - if we only care enough to explore the possibilities.
Many here are deriding Wolfram as "tooting his own horn" on seemingly every page in the book. I do have to concur that this does seem to be the case, but what I also noticed when I read the book, is that he also seems to mention constantly how he was not the first, how others preceeded him (this kind of observation seems to happen at least as often as the first). In a way, I think of his book as a new way of thinking on previously explored ideas, ideas that got explored by many different people, but each on only a different subset of the ideas - whereas Wolfram sought (seeks?) to explore all of it at once (and hence the "great tome" before us), to the point of exhaustion.
I think Wolfram is suffering, in a way, similar to how the Copernican model of the solar system initially sufferred. The Earth-centered solar system of Aristotle and Ptolemy, with it's complex view of epicycles, held sway on Western thinking for almost 2000 years. It took a while for Copernicus' model to be seen as closer to the correct model (it did still require epicycles, only much fewer than the classical model), and even longer for it to be corrected by Galileo and others - eventually paving the way for modern astronomy.
I daresay we shall likely see a similar (though hopefully speedier) version of the same process. It will likely take others to build on Wolfram's (and others) observations and experiments, combined with the knowledge of emergence and network theory, to bring about a revolution in many, many areas of human exploration.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
As someone who paid for the book, I feel completely ripped off now. Hell, if I had known it would eventually be free I never would have bought that expensive, overweight door stop.
As for the book itself, I have no doubt the guy's a genius, but like many others, I saw nothing particularly groundbreaking in his work. I just want my money back.
I love a good pop-sci book to get my teeth into, but I stopped reading this after a few hundred pages: I got sick of the repetition, both of the material under discussion, and the constant assertions Wolfram made about his great vision and ability.
If anyone is interested, I have an account of when I met him during his visit to UIUC in 2002 here. While I agree that the book is interesting, I think it is clear that his book is not going to start the sort of paradigm shift that newton and einstein started. The reason? While interesting things happen with his automota, it is unclear what these results can show about natural phenomena beyond what insight has already been gained by "conventional" science.
This kind of logic always just fries my butt: "other smart people drooled on themselves; this guy is smart; therefor he drools". Come on, folks, we're supposed to be *logical*.
Trying to argue that Wolfram is past his peak and his work is useless just because Einstein tried to find a "theory of everything" is obviously wrong. Will you always dismiss out of hand any project undertaken by a brilliant person after his first success, since Poe failed?
Is that stupid, or what?
Do not buy if any of the following apply to you...
- You have a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Mathematics, or Physics.
- You're Masters Thesis was about cellular automata.
- You've lived a sheltered life and are likely to be deeply and personally offended by a shamless self promoter.
For everyone else, if you've got any interest in computers and math, I'd say you wouldn't consider it a waste of time. In fact, I'd question your geek quotient if you could read the book and resist the urge to sit down and write some of your own programs to experiment with celluar automata."...he raised the suspicions of many in scientific communities that he was taking advantage of a lot of other people's work..."
Well, he did make some rather far reaching claims regarding his effect on others and their subsequent actions. He makes it sound as if he created the entire concept of the Santa Fe Institute and people did what he said, when the fact is he had much the same idea as many others already had and would have followed through on whether he said anything or not.
Having met him, I can say pretty confidently such words and attitude come from not a sense of grandiousity, but rather the extremly internally focused concentration such an advanced independent thinker often operates in. I think his releasing the book online bears that out.
A major complaint against him was a lack of peer review of his work. That came primarily from people who weren't qualified to be his peers. Of those that are, I haven't seen much criticism of the science involved, and that's obviously all that matters to him.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Stephen Wolfram chose to ignore this and many other serious discussions with adequately trained people. He has chosen not to participate in one-on-one public debates with some of the senior physicists willing to challenge his interpretation of the world. Instead he has focused his energy on advertising the book among those whose background is simply not enough to make critical scientific judgments. Make your own conclusions.
The audio, video, and slides of my review and the discussion that followed are available at the above link, and they should be accessible to anyone with a basic high school knowledge of science.
I notice a fair number of books were sold the first couple of days in my local bookstore. The remainder just sat and sat and sat on the shelves.
Mathematica is much more of a rewrite of SMP, which was the symbolic math program Wolfram and Chris Cole wrote at Caltech, because Macsyma was too limited for the physics problems they were working on.
To call Mathematica essentially a rewrite of Macsyma is like saying that Java is essentially a rewrite of Altair Basic.
If you made a new kind of science
don't you think you should have come
up with some testable predictions
that move science forward?
It takes some big ones to push a new science
when they coudn't think of anything new
based on it.
Clarity and modesty: ...Perhaps I might avoid some criticism by a greater display of modesty, but the cost would be a drastic reduction in clarity.
eeewww... So much for today, back to thesis writing. MAYBE I will have some time in the future to read the book and have some informed opinion.
Cheers.
Hes a loner, either by paranoic personality, or impatience with ordinary sub-200 IQ mortals. The conventional university-research establishment requires a minimum of cooperation, but he couldnt deal with that. The breaking point Caltech's IP contracts would only give him 1/3 the roylaties for his prototype of Mathematic. (In the pre dot.com era that was a fairly typical contract.) So he left to run his own company. His lack of citing other people's related wotk permeates NKS. This is unscientific. Even Isaac Newton, another paranoic genius who may have geneuine invented many ideas ex-nihlo said "If I've have seen further, it is because I've stood on the shoulder of giants."
Its rather fascinating as an exhaustive catalog of 1D cellular automata behavior. I was less impressed at the end material that claimed these could explain most everthing in the universe. The numerous footnotes are worth reading completely too.
A good idea is not to post links to pay sites with your membership info in them. An even better idea is not to do this on /. !!!
Indeed.
"The university is nothing more nor less than a place to show off: if it ceased to be that, it would cease to exist." -- Hugh Nibley (himself a lifelong scholar and academic!)
=)
For fun, you might like to look at a java applet I wrote soon after this book came out. You plug in Wolfram's codes and it'll produce dependant automata like he describes in some chapters.
The applet is here, at my personal website. Enjoy!
You may also notice the background image one of those automata. :)
Your example in Mathematica:
{{Sin[x], -Cos[y], ArcTan[z]},
{1, Sin[y], 3Cos[z]},
{12x, Tan[2y], Sin[Pi[] z]}}
And yes, Mathematica can manipulate this matrix symbolically, including factorizations, eigenvalues, etc.
and not wait around clicking a few thousand times...
e s/$destfile";
(no registration required)
#!/usr/bin/perl
$minpage = 1;
$maxpage = 1197;
for ($idx=$minpage; $idx <= $maxpage; $idx++)
{
$destfile = sprintf("%4.4d.gif",$idx);
$src= "http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/pageimag
$ref= "http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-1";
print "Retrieving page $idx of $maxpage\n";
$res = `curl -o $destfile -e $ref $src`;
}
Let the crushing begin!
Now to automate the OCR process...
Somehow, I have a feeling the online copy will not spell nearly as much doom as my hardcover edition for the roaches that plague my humble domicile.
Here's the review from Physics Today (http://physicstoday.org/pt/vol-55/iss-7/p55.html) (c) American Instute of Physics Wolfram on Cellular Automata; A Clear and Very Personal Exposition A New Kind of Science Stephen Wolfram Wolfram Media, Champaign, Ill., 2002. $44.95 (1197 pp.). ISBN 1-57955-008-8 Reviewed by Leo P. Kadanoff Early in the 1980s, Stephen Wolfram began to work in earnest on cellular automata, a class of computer model that can be visualized as a set of memory locations, each containing one bit. The bits are updated in a succession of time steps. In each step, the new value of each bit depends on the values of neighboring bits. Wolfram particularly studied the class of automata in which all the bits are arranged in a line, and each bit is updated using the very same functional dependence on its value and that of its two nearest neighbors. There are 256 different automata of that type. Wolfram made it his business to conduct a systematic study of all those different automata using extensive computer simulations, and to think about and generalize from what he thereby uncovered. A New Kind of Science, written and published by Stephen Wolfram, is the outcome of those and related studies. A New Kind of Science is several things at once. First, it is an excellent pedagogical tool for introducing a reader, even one who has no knowledge of advanced mathematics, to some of the concepts of modern computer science, mathematics, and physics. Space-time diagrams of the bits generated by the model show four separate patterns: dull uniformity, periodic time-dependence, fractal behavior, and truly complex nonrepetitive patterns. A discussion of this classification, which I think is originally due to Wolfram, enables the author to introduce modern concepts of complexity. Using these concepts he can discuss fractals (as they were introduced by Benoit Mandelbrot), the idea of universal computation (as it was developed by Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, and others), and the generation of complex patterns in a context in which one can actually see what is going on. The teaching continues with the description of several kinds of computers and of the conceptualization of natural processes as some kind of computation. This is a tour de force of clarity and simplicity. Since the book covers so huge a territory, it should not be surprising to find a few errors in it. For example, in my own area of phase transitions: Wolfram says on page 981 that phase transitions involve a discontinuity in the partition function, and on page 983 that symmetries are usually not important in phase transition problems. Both statements are incorrect. Errors like these will no doubt be ironed out in subsequent editions. A New Kind of Science is a very personal book. In it Wolfram tells the reader again and again how he discovered some new fact about automata, or used the automata to construct a new illustration of old ideas, or used his knowledge of these systems to construct the beginning of new hypotheses about mathematics or science. These descriptions of the personal events in the development of Wolfram's understanding are valuable both for the insights they give into the science involved and for the revelations they offer about the author himself. This aspect of the book is truly unique. However, the reporting of history is spotty and sometimes quite weak. That weakness is partially structural, in that the author has not allowed himself any footnotes in the text. Instead, at the back of the book, there are 350 pages of notes that include both history and additional information about the topics in the text; any given topic might be covered in several different places. These notes do not contain any references either; they simply give authors, and sometimes dates. To find original sources one must look up a Web site; I did not choose to do this. Because of this structure, and an overuse of the words "discover" or "discovery," it is hard to distinguish among things that were explained previously by Wolfram and coauthors, well-k
> Most Ph.D. students at Caltech and other American institutes don't take classes. They may sit in on
> one or two classes to pick up a subject they missed. But there are no classes set up for just
> Ph.D. candidates nor are there any required courses for the degree.
This is, in general, false. I'm finishing up a PhD (CS) at an American institution, and not only are there two years of required courses here, there were just about as many required at the other 10 places I considered attending.
This is not true for all places (Stanford CS has no course requirements), and may not be true for all fields, but most PhD programs in the US seem to have course requirements.
Poets self-publish. Creators of very expensive software (our Microsoft-oriented liberal arts campus gives much more money to Wolfram Inc. then Microsoft) don't self-publish, they just have it published.
You will understand within the first few pages.
Check out Rudy Rucker's sensible, thourough review and summary of the book. In twelve pages he'll give you a good idea of what you're getting into. Here's the URL:
a m_ review_AMM_11_2003.pdf
http://sjsu.rudyrucker.com/%7Erudy.rucker/wolfr
I heard about Wolfram's book a while back, picked it up, and read it. Well, 90% of it. I do agree with some of the harsh remarks directed towards the patently unacademic (read, un-peer reviewed) method in which Wolfram is purporting his (supposedly) new ideas, but I think he's proposing something even worse:
His "New Kind of Science" is based purely on supposition and example..by example by example. This isn't science.
Observation is not scientific proof, it is only the first step in attempting to _explain why_ something occurs. I read a whole lot of "Here, if we make a cellular automaton use it looks a whole lot like ". Even Wolfram admits that among the millions of combinations of rules, something interesting is bound to happen. That this interesting automaton should hope to _explain_ something physically important is simply supposition, not proof that the physical world obeys some underlying automaton.
When Wolfram can devise an automaton that quantitatively _predicts_ the behavior of a physical system, then I will be impressed. Oh, with a caveat. The prediction shouldn't be a trivial one, where an already existing quantitative description exists that is simply discretized into an automaton and declared "new". (I've seen this done and it isn't impressive.)
Salis
Favorite
Wolfram's book seems to be only the latest in studies by people looking at chaos, complexity, CA etc. They all seem make the mistake of undistributed middle term where:
Simple iterative functions can produce complex phenomena.
We observe similar complex phenomena in nature.
Therefore, the simple iterative functions describe-simulate-have something to do with the complex natural phenomena. Same mistake as:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is mortal.
Therefore, Socrates is a man.
(has to be a subset of a subset)
Ultimately, these guys need to show prediction or models that have parameters that are important to the phenomena described (feigenbaum constants don't count).
Wolfram has had two big problems with his book.
The first issue is scholarship: Many, many results published by living specialists in Cellular Automata are given without footnoting the original author. This has made almost everyone in the CA community really, really angry at Wolfram.
The second issue is the soundness of the fundamental thesis This goes "CAs are responsible for many natural complex phenomena. CAs are undecidable therefore nature is based on CAs and by the way, undecidable". The book fails as evidence of the thesis because it fails to give convincing evidence of a single natural instance of a CA, with the corresponding ruleset. Indeed it digs a deep grave for the thesis, because if Wolfram cannot, with 10 years of work of his undoubted intellect, conclusively exhibit some naturally occurring CAs, that is already evidence that there are fewer such objects than he would wish.
Aside from the issues above, comes the argument that computational complexity is contributory to naturally occurring complexity in say hydrodynamics. And that computation should be treated as a first class citizen in physics - this argument is well presented in the book and deserves to be taken seriously, but again - it does not originate in any way with Wolfram.
By the way, my name is Edmund Ronald. I stand behind my nutshell review.
This is not a signature.
Here is a very good review based solely on the scientific claims made in the book.
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089
http://notanumber.net/
His talks are on line also.
A sample:
And in this simple example we know a lot about how to classify the possible particle-like objects. Kuratowski's theorem tells us that in our networks single lumps of nonplanarity must be like K33s. But the actual nonplanarity is sort of hard to localize. A bit like in quantum mechanics.
Well, in more realistic cases it's much more complicated, and there's lots of unknown graph theory. But there are signs of all sorts of other features of quantum field theory, and gauge invariance, and so on.
It all looks extremely promising. It really seems like out there in the computational universe there may be a simple program that's a precise version of our universe. And if nothing else, the process of trying to find it is bringing up some pretty interesting issues linking geometry, computation, graph theory, recursion theory and so on.
Readers may be interested in an excellent review
of "New Kind of Science" from the journal Science
by Melanie Mitchell of University of Oregon and the
Santa Fe Institute. The review is both thorough and
balanced.
From what I've read so far, well, I'm reminded of one critical analysis of those Tao of Physics books that were so popular 20-30 years ago: the physics readers knew the physics was poor but were blown away by the Zen; the Zen readers knew the Zen wasn't so good but were impressed by the Physics; very few readers knew enough of both fields to realize there was actually little to Zukav and friends. With Wolfram, seems like a similar interdisciplinary shuffle of computers, math, and science. How many of us know enough about all three fields to say how valid Wolfram's ideas are?
Or for that matter, how much is new. Scientific simulation is not new, nor are mathematical models, or even scientific visualization. Perhaps this is where people feel he takes credit for others' ideas?
Well, keep in mind that this is a popular book; it's not peer-reviewed. In fact it's self-published; there are no standards here. It's a beautiful book, it's a fun book, I enjoy reading it, but it's neither more nor less than one person's ideas.
I dunno. Weiss seems to get a real kick out of finding ways to make himself look smarter than Wolfram. Most of these claims are "X was not included", which is the sort of thing that person A might think of, but not person B. Writing a 1K page theory book with zero errors is not bad.
I haven't read Wolfram's work. For all I know, it might not be that great. But it does seem to me that Weiss was out to shoot down Wolfram. You can find flaws with *any* body of work the size of Wolfram's.
If Weiss was really interested in an objective review to help others out, he'd have no interest in attacking Wolfram's character or in being rabid over what he saw as self-aggrandization.
Can I buy a work that isn't all original work and enjoy it? Sure. Most CS works are *not* particularly original. They contain a specialization of something, or a restating or reformatting of that. There's too much pressure to publish for folks to publish for someone to put out no more than the one or perhaps two truly new and revolutionary ideas they have during their lifetimes. I think few PhDs can reasonably produce a hundred worthwhile papers in their lifetime.
May we never see th
This really highlights what a megalomaniac Wolfram is. While he may be remembered after his death, I imagine it will be for his insufferable ego, not for his scientific achievements.
I suspect that many people said this about Sir Newton, who was also supposed to be an amazingly arrogant asshole. (This is not to suggest that Dr. Wolfram is Sir Newton's equal, just that someone being arrogant has hardly kept them from fame before.)
Oh, and regarding Mathematica: its use by students should be banned until they are able to outperform it in terms of mathematical sophistication. Its overuse in universities is leading to an intellectually-stunted generation.
I cannot agree.
I agree that it is producing a more highly specialized generation. I assume that you are acquiring or have graduated with a computer science or mathematics degree. When you started on your degree, were you required to learn the philosophical foundation of mathematics? How about the physics and chemistry required to build the computer that any practical implementation of your work would require use of?
At one point, a well-educated man could encompass most of the known fields of work. Later, it was still possible to understand a single field well. You could literally be simply a chemist, a physicist, or a mathematician. As the knowledge present in each field has exploded, the sliver of that field that can be fully known and understood by each person has dwindled. That is not necessarily bad -- it's simply a phenomenon that was abound to happen. It would be ideal for someone to fully understand, from the ground up, the field they work in, but that is less and less practical.
I can cook a nice side of garlic bread. However, I have no knowledge of how to grow garlic itself, or of what processes and safety measures are involved in the production of the flour used in the bread. I don't even really know what goes into the bread. I don't know how to ward off insects from the grain used in the bread. If you removed me from society, I would die. I simply cannot function -- I am too specialized -- without society.
Furthermore, given that knowledge has been increasing, each generation in a field will tend to have less an understanding of the fundamentals than their predecessors. This makes interdiciplinary knowledge sharing more difficult, and easier to make foundational mistakes, but is a prerequisite for the degree of advancement that we have achieved.
For example -- I have never manually determined a square root. I simply have never had the need to to so, and schools no longer taught one how to find one by the time I went through school. My parents needed to learn this information, but I did not. If you took away all my computers and calculators, I could not determine a square root for you. Oh, I might be able to come up with an inefficient algorithm and manually, slowly, come up with an answer, but I would really be, to some degree, unable to function without my computing devices.
If I needed to implement a calculator one day (and, incidently, calculators use different methods than the manual method we do to obtain numerical approximations of square roots), I could look up how people once did things by hand. However, generally, a specialized profession (calculator designer) has managed to take over and handle much of my work for me.
Using Mathematica to do, say, advanced integration, makes perfect sense to me. Running through a vast collection of tricks to get a stubborn formula to integrate is, frankly, a waste of human time. A phenomenal amount of human time is wasted memorizing and trying to apply integration tricks. Why bother? Sure, it's not inconcievable that one day, I might do something sub-optimally because I lack knowledge in the area. However, if I *know* that I need to know something, I can track down an expert who does know. In the meantime, I will enjoy *known* significant time savings.
I'm sure every generation has complained about this as specialization increases. It isn't new, and I don't believe that it's particularly negative.
May we never see th
I had a bit to do with Wolfram in the late 1980s and have been actively following the NKS project. The essay currently on my discoloured home page is my relatively recent take on the subjects raised in your post, which is almost too good for a /. post.
The 2% I partly disagree with is that Wolfram is saying something important that Dawkins (and other politically correct authoritarians) would have us ignore in that the mechansisms for producing variation are at least as important as the mechanisms for selection in the grand sweep of evolutionary history, and that I'd rather call Stephen "different" than "weird".
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Every now and then, I run across a really, truly interesting comment on Slashdot. Your simple, elegant, anti-alternative-medicine argument is one. Bravo.
May we never see th
The first time I heard of the Planck distance and Planck time, cellular automata became much more interesting. That's why I'm interested in ANKOS. Besides, maybe I can get some good cites for the source material.
The idea that even space and time are discrete (composed of tiny parts) instead of continuous, could have some very interesting implications. Lots of systems that are discrete appear continuous, but atomic theory made a lot of difference in physics and chemistry.
I don't disagree that Wolfram is a crank, but he's a bright crank who is stealing from interesting people and talking about interesting things. I've met those people before, and they can be worth talking to as long as you keep your perspective. Like a paranoiac who's lead an interesting life. Listen, just don't get too close.
I'll be looking over ANKOS online if the terms aren't too onerous. If they are, I'll buy a used copy of the book. Since he sued to prevent a presentation at a mathematical conference, I'll never buy a new copy. That's just wrong.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
...that the universality of cellular automata has been known from at least as far back as when Wolfram was a toddler. People fully understood the implications of this at the time: i.e. if you believe the universe is mechanistic and can be simulated on a computer then a cellular automaton can do it too. About 0.000000x10^-42% of this observation is due to Wolfram.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
that the last name of the auther of "A New Kind of Science", is the Old name for Tungsten?
Excellent point. I'd wager that the same people who whine about ANKOS are also the ones who pooh-pooh Godel, Escher, Bach. They may not contain a college education between their pages, but they're both interesting reads.
is that complex phenomena (which pass statistical tests for randomness) can come from simple rules. This is the foundation of the whole book, and Wolfram seems to believe that he's the first to notice it. He is not. Plenty of mathematicians have noticed this in the past, particularly with aperiodic tilings. For example, simple local tiling rules can lead to globally complex non-repeating patterns in a way very similar to his CA patterns. Yet he never mentions this vast body of research in his book. I wonder why.
'He is also quite arrogant. He had to gall to send the original coders checks in the amount of 50 dollars as "compensation" for their work -- you can see such a check on a certain professor's door.' Which professor is that? Tell us so his door can get slashdotted.
I read through the majority of the 310 comments on this story (310 as of this moment) and I can't believe no one has touched on an important aspect of the scientific community's backlash against Wolfram's book: he end-ran them.
He may be egotistical (I read most of ANKOS and I did not find his constant self-laudation very charming), but so are many people in science and math. In what other fields can one prove beyond a shadow of a doubt the significance of one's contributions? The Huxleys and Jungs of history could never have felt quite the same tinge of accomplishment as Einstein must have, because literature and psychology have no such measure of the value of an idea. So there is more to scientific self-puffery than just ego, it is a very human thing for humans to fall into this trap when they have managed to make a real, recognizable contribution. (Earlier in this thread, in fact, I saw someone taken to task for Newton's ever-misunderstood "on the shoulders of giants" as a symbol of his humility...which it was not, though arguably so.)
So I think we can all agree, if on nothing else, that Wolfram's ego is definitely not the only ego involved here. Instead of publishing his ideas in the framework of the mathematical and scientific research communities, he chose to publish his findings to the world-at-large. This, in and of itself, can be seen as an immensely egotistical act (one I'm glad of, though, as I'll explain). By doing this, he is essentially saying that his ideas are so great they are likely to be misunderstood (the plaintive cry of many a genius) by his peers and relegated to the back shelf until the community catches up with him. He's confident he's hit on some seed of truth, and he wants to spur the world to cultivate it so he can live to see its fruits...probably so he can hear his praises sung while still living. Not very selfless.
His feeling that his genius is too great to be contained by the research community is felt by every other member of that community, but they lack the means to do anything about it. ANKOS (the book, not the science) is quite enough of an affront to these people for them to bring the full weight of their intellectual wrecking ball to bear on Wolfram's tome. Certainly this is not true across the board, but just as certainly there is at least some venom reserved for him out of animus.
The problem with all this demogoguery that inevitably follows great men around is that the focus very quickly falls upon the men involved instead of the ideas. (One thing we all must admit: Wolfram is a great man. Keep in mind that I'm using "great" in the sense of the gravitas of his ideas. In this same sense Hitler was one of history's terrible greats, as the grand sum of his ideas had enough weight to sweep an entire nation to madness. In fact, in this sense I supposed Hitler was a much greater man than Wolfram; if Hitler's ideas swept a community to madness, Wolfram's ideas only achieved anger. :-) ) So to Wolfram's serious detractors, I hear you with a suspicious ear, while fairness requires that I simply ignore Wolfram's own self-congratulations. If only all such commentary were passionate only toward ideas and dispassionate towards men, it would not take history so long to sift through the idea pile.
We ought to judge people for the most part based on their actions and the results of those actions, not their motivations. Wolfram may have end-run his community out of ego, but I believe the effect in this particular case to be positive. Look at it this way: he has taken the time to introduce these ideas to an entire generation of laypeople. This may present the work in a form that is undesirable to academic researchers, but it certainly does not preclude them from judging those ideas. The upshot is, it's an inclusive strategy that makes the work accessible to everyone. What's bad about t
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
Plus other articles on the web.
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
It should be "In vita non pax est." You never use the accusative case with the verb esse.
*None* of the things you mention: celular automata, the edge of chaos, etc, were concepts /invented/ by Wolfram.
Even his mathematical Computer Algebra system was just something that had been invented before, with Macsymsa. As the story goes, there has been some plagiarism there too...
You mentioned Stuart Kauffman. Now here's a serious investigator from the Santa Fe Institute who seems to be on to something really new about complex system: check out his new book "Investigations". A new law of thermodynamics?
There are other computer algebra systems that have been open sourced: check out Axiom.
Not entirely related, see GAP.
...to make something downloadable from this bunch of indeopendent pages? i use dial-up modem, so reading page-by-page will cost me a fortune...
Definitely going into my bookmarks!
I guess I appreciate the fact that he put it online, because I had seriously thought about buying this book. In it I see he found the stuff we were doing 25 years ago. But that's ok, independent work = good! It gets you a cookie, but not my $.
For example, in my own programing language, Andycal, the following program would give you a hot sandwich:
BringMeAFuckingSandwith(hotness=hot);
I just haven't implemented the necessary functions yet. This should explain the "Wouldn't a two-line program" part.
Do not run this program on Wife or Girlfriend
or she might run
(Glock){aim){pull_trigger
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
BTW, I own the book, and I'm not going to make the content available for anyone else, so other than the extra server load (at 12:21am PST-8 and well beyond the initial
Aren't those omissions exactly the kind of thing that would have been remedied if Wolfram had put his book through peer review? On the whole, I suppose the reviewer hit the nail on the head with his remark that Wolfram saw his material as revolutionary precisely because he was a physicist turning towards computer science. Starting from a computer science point of view, the idea that the universe works through simple computations is obvious, but of course not provable at this point of time. The problem is that Wolfram offers nothing fundamentally new on this idea...
Is Wolfram crazy, eccentric, grandeos or a Scientologist?
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
I can honestly say that in this area I cannot distinguish genuine results from well disguised quackery. :) So I might read ANKOS, but I will probably withhold the final judgement until better specialists decide on it.
http://www.gordon.ru/konkurssite/kui.html
Still, I wanted to tell about another interesting work - "Theory of Physical Structures" by Russian physicist Yuri Kulakov. He might be a fraud as well, but his talk on one scientific TV programme was quite interesting.
His idea is also that there might be simplier math behind the Universe than our current equations. He also argues that there are some common principles on which all possible mathematical rules (i.e. potential physical rules) are built. Frankly, I have not read either ANKOS or Kulakov's work and I am not qualified to judge their quality, but the ideas strike me as similar.
Both links are in Russian, sorry.
http://www.credo-pst.com/book/index.html
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
From page 2 of ANKoS - "One might have thought - as at first I certainly did - that if the rules for a program were simple then this would mean that its behavior must also be correspondingly simple..... But the pivotal discover I made some eighteen years ago is that in the world of programs such intuition is not even close to correct."
I know he's talking ultimately about CA in this book but getting two pages into it I'm not willing to read a paragraph more from the above sentences alone. Gee, Prof Wolfram, you mean by taking a simple 'program' like, oh I don't know, c=a+b*i and iterating it I could produce complex results? Wow! That's amazing, I'm so glad you "discovered" that simple rules can create complex outputs that explain natural processes.
It only takes three transformations and rotations of a rectangle iterated over and over to produce a fractal fern, I learned and understood that concept at 12 when I first read about Gaston Julia who did his work circa 1920. I just don't see how Wolfram's expression of the same theory in the field of CA makes it anymore new or scientifically ground breaking. And if he thinks his little shaded graph paper patterns are so complex he should try generating the Mandelbrot set by hand!
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --