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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."
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
... 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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Yes - but on the other hand, for every person who was proclaimed to be full of crap but was actually a genius, there really were 999 people who were, in fact, just full of crap.
Elgon
True. The universe is described by complicated equations wrought by the human mind.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
The idea that the universe is the product of the combinatorial effects of different combinations of events seems neither unique nor unexpected.
Pretty much any idea, if expressed sufficiently broadly and vaguely, will seem "neither unique nor unexpected."
By comparison, Wolfram is just a bored dilletante scribbling on the back of an envelope.
:)
And you the mighty gowen have contributed so much to society. Wolfram is indeed a genius.He is up there with the likes of Stephen Hawking, just in a different field. He did build some of his work off of other people's, but that is what science is. Modern Physics was built off of Newton's work which was then in turn added to by others until it has reached its amazing point in this day and age where we can send a small robot to a crater on a planet millions of miles away. Quantum Mechanics is also commonly contributed to Albert Einstein who's work was then contributed to by others. But before Einstein there was Max Planck. The reason the human race has progressed as such is because we learn from our predecessors and build on that knowledge. 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.The guy is smart and I've read this entire book cover to cover and have referenced it several times. He makes insights into the field that no one has ever mentioned before. And after hearing him speak at one of his conferences in New York I have the upmost respect for him and his brilliance. If you still don't believe me, read the book, or just go to his website and browse it. Even better, try to duplicate Mathematica and see how far you get.I'm not trying to start a flame or anythign like that, but unless you are really familar with this guy then you can't really comment. I've followed his works for at least 5 years now.
Regards,
Steve
P.S. Another guy worth checking out who is affiliated with Wolfram is Eric Weisstein who has a great website and sells an encyclopedia for mathematics, which I also own and couldn't live without
He may be a smart guy, but I think he might just be recycling old material and calling it the Next Big Thing (TM)
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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
Here's my concern. I HAVE read the book. Not cover-to-cover, but a good deal of it, and I have to say that it's pie-in-the-sky stuff. Still, what I see people doing is jumping on this guy and saying that he's a kook, asshole, and various other derogitory words without a single shred of substantive argument against his points!
;-)
Yes: he is arguing that, at a very high level, current scientific approaches to large systems are flawed. I understand that that's off-putting to many, but you can't expect such a broad change in perspective to be done a) from the bottom-up nor b) without substantial leaning on the research of others. It's a theory, and a big one at that, so you accept that it's there and you don't base any substantial work or other theory on it until it is beaten on a bit. All I see in these responses is An Old Kind of Science that has been practiced by entrenched organizations like churches for thousands of years.
This kind of knee-jerk ostricization of bright people with ideas is just plain wrong. Maybe he's wrong about the idea, but you don't smack a guy down just for writing his ideas down, you correct where wrong if you want to be helpful or ignore if you don't. Being rude just isn't called for.
He claims no where in the book that I could find that others had not also covered much of this ground, but I don't think it's at all fair to say that that makes this book wholely unoriginal or at all ignorable. After all, he's relying on a body of mathematics that has been carved out over the last 3000 years! I also don't think that it's fair to say that ideas that he shares in common with others were not his. He's a bright enough guy that I think it's quite possible that in 10 years of cloistering himself off and working on this, he re-invented a few wheels. So what? That should neither diminish him nor those who covered the same ground before or in parallel with him (I don't think any less of Liebnitz, even though I'm not sure how to spell his name
Let's all just calm down, take a deep breath and try not to be the Church of Established Science for a moment.
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.
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."
I have an account AND an review.
The AC is half right. It is not a great work like the Principia Mathematica. He spends way too much time dwelling on his cellular automata. His book could have used an editor willing to tell the brooding genius that his ideas weren't really explained well. His layman's language and reiteration of his WAY understated hypothesis make him seem like more of an amateur than he is.
But he's not doing it for the money. The book is huge, printed using an expensive process and self-published. Even still, it was cheap...$45, less than half the cost of a physics textbook and about what I'd expect to pay for a good poetry collection. To self produce and distribute such a massive and expensive to produce book, even with the massive press behind it, he can't have recouped enough to make the effort worthwhile.
It's my opinion that Stephen really thought he was on to something. It's also my opinion that he was on to something, but that he dwelled too much in the mechanics to really explain what he was doing to people who don't care about cellular automata. I also wonder if his programs are influenced by hidden variables (like his choice of borders, and their effects). Really, this book needs a companion volume written by somebody who can explain what the Stephen's talking about when he says "New Kind of Science" without going on and on about series numbers and alternating gray squares.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
While that's true the way it's written, I'd say: To do research is a necessary, but not sufficient requirement. A PhD is about gaining expertise in a field of science, and advance the knowledge of that field by doing research (and publishing it, or at least have it publically scrutinised). To prove the 'expertise' part (but not necessarily atain it) you're usually required to take classes.
Note that there's in general no way to skip the first point, by being clever. It takes work even if you're the brightest SOB to be walking around today. The world is full of smartarses of all levels of intelligence that know only of their own ideas, without as much as a clue about anybody elses, past or present.
In my humble opinion, the first part is really the tricky part these days, with so much being published. Staying abrest of your field, so that you can correctly value the judgements of your contributions to the field (or your ideas before they become contributions) is a bit of a chore, and it's easy (too easy in fact) to miss that vital piece of information that puts your work in a whole new light (such as "that's been done before").
Stefan Axelsson
He's doing cellular automata, for heaven's sake! Those of us over 15 have been doing these things since before you kiddies were born! How much more Church of Established Science could Wolfram be!?
The point is that all Wolfram has done is say "look, cellular automata are cool and they can model complex stuff". We knew that. We knew it 30 years ago. The reason people hate him is that he's utterly convinced that he's a genius, so he arrogates this title of "A New Kind Of Science" to his incredibly old kind of science. Also, he doesn't actually produce any useful results (there's some vague handwavy wibble about modelling a growing leaf with a CA - gee, d'ya think a CELLular automata might be a model of a leaf?), so his New Kind Of Science is all Kinds of useless. Get some experimental results in and come back.
Nobody (sane) questions Wolfram's intelligence, however that doesn't mean that NKS is really as groundbreaking as he claims it is. I bought a copy, found it thick, heavy, dense, in turns fascinating and confusing, but damn if I can see anything in it that justifies Wolfram's claims of "new science". One can be utterly brilliant and still overly arrogant and in some cases even wrong. In fact, I question any "genius" who is unable to notice when s/he's wrong. Whether Wolfram falls in that category is yet to be seen.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
The book doesn't point out anything more than hints and allegations of what you said. As other people have pointed out, he solves nor resolves NO existing problem with his approach, he just shows how CA behavior maps to real systems behavior and says "aha!" and moves on.
When you combine that with the VAST amount of self-horn-tooting that he engages in, you get a fairly dull book.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
That's probably true by his own estimation. I'm surprised that you say you read the book. I did too, and while there are a few interesting things in there, for the most part it's a lot of chest thumping and self-promotion. He continually trumpets how "simple programs" - i.e., cellular automata - will surely explain all of the mysteries of the universe and that therefore he is the second coming of Isaac Newton. Fair enough; on an intuitive level I can see how this might be so, and I eagerly plowed through the book waiting for some solutions to physical problems that would illustrate his thesis. Nothing of the sort was to be found. All we get is, "Looky here! More pretty patterns from my simple rules!" It was as if Newton, instead of developing the Calculus and actually applying it to physical problems, had just waved his arms and said, "Surely there are mathematical equations that govern the Universe!" and left it at that. Now that's an important insight, but if that's all he did we probably wouldn't even know his name.
While I don't doubt Wolfram's contribution to CA and discrete mathematics, he's trying to join a club for which he hasn't (yet) paid his dues.
Quantum Mechanics is also commonly contributed to Albert Einstein
You're not a physicist, are you? That's just not true. Einstein resisted the ideas behind quantum mechanics for a long time; he couldn't accept that "God plays dice with the Universe". I'm not sure that he ever really accepted it.
I have worked in several of the labs where Steve has worked. Does not play well with others is a common conclusion.
The big problem with Steve's book is that he is simply unable to see that a large part of what he is proposing is simply stating existing ideas in a different notation.
Einstein surrounded himself by people who he considered his intellectual peers, people like Kurt Goedel. Steve shut himself up in a room for ten years and basically talked only to the people he felt like. He surrounded himself with a bunch of sycophants in the manner of a pop star - we have all seen what that has done to Michael Jackson. I decided not to read the book after I heard the gushing haigographies given by his employees.
It is not surprising that the book got the reception it did. When I heard Steve talking about it I kept thinking 'hammer, nail'. Steve has been working on finite state automata for years. But the standard model of physics today has at its core an idea that is pretty close to being a collection of finite state machines. It is already known that you can simulate one with the other.
I think that the problem that Steve has created here is that the manner of his presentation closely resembles that of a crank. I get letters from cranks calling themselves the new Einstein and Adam Smith combined, actually everyone who has been published in the letters section of the London Times does.
Steve is incredibly bright, but unfortunately no intelligence in history could match his ego, and his does not either.
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