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?
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
"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.
... 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 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
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.
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.
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
I often look to Anonymous Cowards for respected peer review.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
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.
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.
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
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."
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/
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.
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.
The entire first chapter is spent distancing Wolfram's theory from all the fields that gave rise to that theory. His thesis requires that his ideas be new, hence A New Kind of Science. Something is certainly un-aesthetic about having to justify exactly why a particular revolutionary idea is new. Normally, as with dramatic scientific discoveries of the past, the revolutionary aspect to the idea is self-evident. With NKS, it is certainly not. That is cause for concern.
Nobody should claim that Wolfram is not a genius. Egotistical yes. Idiot no. A valid point can be made that he is stepping outside the domain of his genius with NKS. His thesis is essentially a philosophical thesis, and I think his approach leaves entirely open whether the philosophical aspects of his thesis are in any way correct.
For example, the principle of computability is certainly not new. I came across it in Emperor's New Mind. But as a philosophical assertion, I fail to see how it is a priori correct. Wolfram's further developments in NKS focus on the building on an assumption, that while interesting to think about, certainly does not seem sturdy enough to drastically alter science as a whole. That, I think, has more to do with Wolfram's ego than his scientific credibility.
Further, what Wolfram develops through his explorations of emergence is so general that I find it difficult to believe that any results derived from this approach would be appreciable in any human terms. I am not a physicist, but I image working in abstract physics requires some ability to internalize the meaning behind the predictive equations that govern modern thinking on physics. Where are the predictive equations in NKS? What can be internalized or understood? How can Wolfram's theory be used to create new theories?
Instead, I think the approach yields a sort of theory of everything through linguistic trickery. Wolfram's model is so general as to be useless, akin to saying here is a theory of everything, the only catch being to use the theory you have to know everything.