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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."
Thankfully they don't threaten and attack their opponents like scientologists do.
The nonsense is free online. Wow, now millions of people can read it, waste time ...and make fun it.. hopefully. Crazy NKS "goodness" for your reading "pleasure": here .
Trust me, even if it is free, after reading it, you'll want your "free" back.
You didn't actually read the damn thing, did you? I'm getting really tired of this mindless NKS bashing, no matter how fashionable it is. A book that was largely favorably reviewed in Notices of the American Mathematical Society cannot be 100% nonsense, can it really? I find it amusing that those who are most critical of NKS are almost never real scientists.
There are some severe flaws with NKS. The fundamental philosophical claims are highly doubtful, the "new science" mentioned in its title does not live to its name, the egomaniacal tone, the passing off of other people's hard work as Wolfram's own, the revisionist history, etc. But that said, there is a lot to enjoy in the book. The footnotes are worth the price of a copy on their own, as they are in many ways one of the best exposés of the history of the 20th century focusing on computer science, mathematics and physics I have ever read.
I knew a lot about CAs and discrete models before reading the book, most likely more than you know, or will ever know, and yet I really did learn a lot from it. You just have to be intelligent and well-versed enough to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. Maybe that's your real problem with the book?
I don't see your point. Mathematicians have offered prizes before for solving problems. Paul Erdos is the most famous of these and his prizes were very successful IMHO at inspiring young mathematicians to investigate the combinatorial and number theory problems that Erdos was interested in. Even if Dr. Wolfram is grandstanding, he offers good money in return. My take is that $25k is roughly six to nine months of postdoc. Not a bad return.
So, in summary, I see Wolfram here using a proven method for getting math results that he is interested in.