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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
"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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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!
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).
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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.
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...
And if I recall correctly, he received his Ph.D. without ever attending any classes, because the quality of his frequent papers was so high that Caltech risked embarrassment that another university might snap him up and grant him a Ph.D. first.
Whatever this "new kind of science" turns out to be, the guy is an indisputable example of rare genius.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
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.
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.
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.
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)
.
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
Yes Wolfram used a lot of work based on others (and he cites it all)
and:
In the 1990's Matthew Cook served as a research assistant to Stephen Wolfram , where among other things he was directed to develop a proof showing that the Rule 110 cellular automaton is Turing-complete . Under non-disclosure until the publication of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, Cook nevertheless presented his proof at a Santa Fe Institute conference. Subsequently, it was stricken from the published proceedings by court order. Rule 110 is an extremely simple system, and the fact that it is Turing-complete is remarkable. While some view the proof as the book's central contribution, it is notable that in the years between Cook's presentation and the book's final publication, no subsequent follow-on work was done by those who had seen or heard of the proof-likely because its significance was not clear outside of the intellectual structure for which it was developed.
(from wikipedia:Matthew_Cook)
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:)
So, it's weasels all the way down?
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
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/
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
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 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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Evidently he does not, for many have accused Dr. Wolfram of plagiarism. Personally, I find his citations inadequate. He doesn't give nearly enough credit to Edward Fredkin or Tommaso Toffoli or any of the other key researchers in Cellular Automata who advanced the idea that the universe is a giant computational process long before this book was ever published.
Wolfram claims to have originated this idea, and he seems hell-bent on taking the credit away from others, to the point that he's put some rather onerous copyright restrictions on his NKS book and website. This is academically dishonest, to say the least.
That he fucked over his own research assistant, Matthew Cook, is a crime against the advancement of math and science. (Check the Wikipedia article on Matthew Cook. It's enlightening.)
I myself did some work with using Cellular Automata to model physical systems -- my bachelor's thesis (submitted in 1992 to the MIT Physics Department) concentrated on modeling gas diffusion using a one-dimensional CA, and comparing the results against statistical physics theory. Wolfram came late to the party, claims ownership of ideas that rightfully don't belong to any one person (and which he definitely did not originate), and killed a lot of trees to disseminate relatively little new information (the proof that a specific CA is Turing complete, furnished by his research assistant, being the primary noteworthy item). Save yourself the money and the 1200+ pages and read the source material. It's more enlightening.