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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."
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.
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!
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...
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
Wolfram = German for tungsten
Hence 'W' is the symbol for the element tungsten.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
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:)
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/
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
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.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
Kadanoff both discuss the strong points of the book:
But Kadanoff also points out several weaknesses:
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
Perhaps you ought to take the time to read GEB again. There is much more in those short dialogues than meets the eye. It takes some time to figure it all out though.
In a different field now, but much of his pre-Mathematica work was in cosmology. A bunch more was in particle physics. From 1975 to 1983, Wolfram published a LOT of papers on those subjects.
His diversion into mathematical software came about because the existing systems could not handle the scale of problems he was working on, and so he and Chris Cole developed SMP ("Symbolic Mathematics Program").
Wolfram's willingness to go his own way, despite the conventional wisdom, can be seem in the development of SMP. Wolfram and Cole checked with the experts before starting SMP, and were told that such a system had to be written in LISP. C was not suited to that kind of programming, and if they tried it, they would fail. Wolfram and Cole realized that this was bullshit, wrote in C, and SMP completely blew away all the other symbolic mathematics programs of the day.
I'm thinking I should post these in HTML.
8 9.pdf 0 0970-9/S0273-0979-02-00970-9.pdf 2 062325.194d0c8d%40posting.google.com
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/0206/02060
http://www.ams.org/bull/2003-40-01/S0273-0979-02-
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=b9401f8a.030
Yes Wolfram used a lot of work based on others (and he cites it all), but he has also studied Cellular Automata for somewhere between 12 to 20 years.
There are others who disagree with this to a certain degree. The following quote is from a review of the book published in Science Magazine, by Dr. Melanie Mitchell, a well known researcher and author in the field.
She writes: "In fact, most of what Wolfram describes is the work of many people (including himself), and most of it was done at least ten to twenty years ago. Nearly no credits to the contributions of others appear in the book's main text. Some credits can be found in the long notes section at the book's end, but many are not given at all. For example, the snowflake models Wolfram discusses are based on the work of Packard (13), but Packard is not mentioned in connection with them. This is only one example of such inexcusable omissions. Moreover, the book does not contain a single bibliographic citation--an astounding lapse that will put off serious scientific readers. Wolfram's Web site (14) includes "relevant books," but this list is no substitute."
Give GEB another try. Those "wordgames" are an entertaining way to describe and demonstrate some very deep things - paradoxes, recursion, and Godel's theorems.
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.
Plus other articles on the web.
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
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