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Wolfram Offers Prize For (2,3) Turing Machine
An anonymous reader writes "Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica and author of A New Kind of Science, is offering a prize of $25K to anyone who can prove or disprove his conjecture that a particular 2-state, 3-color Turing machine is universal. If true, it would be the simplest universal TM, and possibly the simplest universal computational system. The announcement comes on the 5-year anniversary of the publication of NKS, where among other things Wolfram introduced the current reigning TM champion — 'rule 110,' with 2 states and 5 colors."
You think that's bad? Imagine this without the labels or blood vessels. Then imagine drawing it on the chalkboard and only realizing what you'd drawn after giving a 10-minute lecture on the endocrine system with it behind you the whole time.
Crazy NKS "goodness" for your reading "pleasure": here .
Trust me, even if it is free, after reading it, you'll want your "free" back.
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Of course, any interpretation that requires solving a universal problem to decode the result will be probably ruled out as cheating :-)
And the person that made the proof of what is claimed in the summary was Matthew Cook, not Wolfram himself, Wolfram sued him because he presented his proof in another conference (can you believe what a jerk?).
Of course the person that makes this proof will have to concede every right to Wolfram and therefore in some way the 25K are just a payment for such intellectual property.
And the name removing has been mostly due to his book A new kind of science, where he "comes up" with several ideas that have been created by other authors. I would like to *believe* he makes the typical Master or junior PhD error of not looking hard for the current work but other people believe he just wanted to plagiarize other's people ideas.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
There are some severe flaws with NKS.
You bet!
The fundamental philosophical claims are highly doubtful
Check.
Check
the egomaniacal tone
Also "Check"
the passing off of other people's hard work as Wolfram's own, the revisionist history
One more big "Check". -- This is what did it for me. I wish he made the appendix section the main part of the book. That's where he actually mentioned who did what before him and I found the examples there more interesting than Wolfram's prose + pictures. Yes, as scientist I am very sensitive and biased when it comes to passing someone's work as your own, that is very much a "no-no" in the scientific community. The only time the rest of the world hears about the scientists is when they discover something really amazing or plagiarize.
Overall, was the reading insteresting?, -- it was alright for me. I learned some new things as well (but mostly things others did that W. re-did in Mathematica) about CA, tag systems, fractals and such. But it was anything but a "New Kind Of Science". It wasn't "New" (just re-packaged) and it wasn't a "Science" it was just prose. Apart from few examples, W.'s "proofs" consist of phrases like "I strongly believe X", "I am quite confident that Y" and "Look at the pretty picture I generated!".
Trust me I tried to like it: I paid money for the book and spent time reading it, I didn't want o believe that I somehow 'wasted' it, but in the end I have to be honest to myself and say 'no' it isn't what it claims to be and 'yes' I wish I hadn't spent the time and money buying it.
Who knows which proof it was and why Wolfram wanted to keep it secret, but those are not the actions I would expect of a successful research mathematician.
It may be interesting to those who aren't just here to bash Wolfram that this offer to provide a prize for a proof of one of his key conjectures in A New Kind of Science (NKS) comes only seven weeks after another key conjecture was disproved. (The fact that that disproof was brought to public notice by the NKS Forum moderator might suggest that the ongoing NKS project is happy enough for results to fall whichever way they will.)
On a visit to Champaign-Urbana in the late 1980s, still before he officially started on NKS, Wolfram took me through where he felt his cellular automata research was headed which hinted at some of the inferences he would eventually draw from his mountains of research data. That was even before the Santa Fe Institute paper which was foolishly read as retreating from the edge of chaos-border of order which had briefly been the focus of the quest for the source of emergent complexity during the 1980s.
The resources Wolfram is bringing to the table are significant and have certainly helped put complex systems back in the spotlight after far too many of the first generation of researchers were seduced by the marginal returns they could get by applying their methods to the derivatives market, no matter whether their methods made a significant difference or not.
The downside of continuing to focus on the simplest possible mechanisms (Wolfram calls them 'programs') as the source of a critical threshold is that all those much sought after proofs of universality, from the early one for Conway's Life on, are vast feats of engineering and thus make no useful progress towards the implicit goal of helping to explain how we/anything got here in the first place.
So I'll keep playing with my own idiosyncratic program to explore a bit deeper in that narrow and difficult transition region between order and chaos, but might be tempted to have another look at Mathematica's increasing support for such research once it is available via CP6AN.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
In reality the future is completely fixed? I'm guessing you're not a physicist. Quantum mechanics is an inherently probabilistic theory -- you can calculate the probability of given events happening, but that's it. You can smash the same two particles together five times in a row and get five different results.
The future is absolutely not fixed, because randomness is deeply engrained into our universe.
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