Wolfram's New Kind of Science Now Online 480
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."
I've seen him talk (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:New Kind of Hype? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Or perhaps... (Score:2, Interesting)
worth the money (Score:5, Interesting)
Bloated HYpe (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe this work shoulde be burned in the fireplace where it belongs
Before anybody complains about Wolfram's book, (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
A New Kind of Science (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:I've seen him talk (Score:5, Interesting)
Incidentally, what's with that "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"? If he failed to give proper credit (I have no idea if he did or didn't) that's equally wrong regardless of what terms the text is published under. Free distribution isn't a remedy for plagiarism and where on earth did the submitter get the idea that academics don't normally publish under copyright?
As for his motivation, that's easy. He genuinely thinks he's solved everything and he wants to broadcast it as widely as possible.
I read the whole book (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Or perhaps... (Score:5, Interesting)
I completely agree. My impression was that here we had this prodigy guy, PhD at 15 and all. Success in business, as well, creating his company with its well-regarded math tool. Now then: what to do next? Where does a person like that go? Move to the country and take up a hobby? Unlikely. Seems to me that he just wants his place in history badly.
Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order [amazon.com] is better in every way. Inspiring, humble before his subject, full of actual insights and examples from the real world, and absolutely beautiful.
Re:So What's the Deal? (Score:2, Interesting)
You might as well have written "a neuron is simply a cell, connected to other similar cells, that responds to input and generates output". It's true, but it's irrelevant. Put 20 billions neurons together, however, and things start to get interesting.
But what do I know. My brain haven't read the book yet.
Re:Or perhaps... (Score:1, Interesting)
Take the theory of evolution which is given as an example. You have the shell of a nautilus which spirals out with chambers at regular intervals. There is a mathematical function which precisely describes the shell's structure. Does this mean that the shell could never have been shaped otherwise? According to CA, yes, that particular shape is the only possible shape that would be permissible by that mathematical function. It would be difficult to change the function enough such that it would be close enough to the existing function and yet far enough away to produce a cohesive shell instance. In essence, CA proponents are forced to discount the existence of evolution because such a gradual process cannot be accounted for with CA.
So was all of creation born into existence as we see it? CA would say yes, with the caveat that certain mutations would be encountered when both of the above requirements were met. But modern biology has shown that evolution is indeed a gradual process not dependent upon these functions. The fact that there exist mathematical functions which explain and describe certain biological forms is interesting, but it is not any more significant than that.
The Taoists figured this out 3000 years ago. (Score:0, Interesting)
So the Tao Te Ching covered this before western science had advanced to the pound of feathers pound of lead which differentiation system.
For people who missed it the one being the Tao, the two being yin and yang or a binary system, the three being simple rules and 10,000 is just old Chinese for an infinite amount. So Wolfram is right on but not breaking any ground and could have gotten the same results by meditating for ten years facing a wall. I just like to plug the Tao again for a second by pointing out that its the only religion/philosophy that also covers quantum uncertainty and particle physics. They also covered the raw food diet, the Atkins diet and just about every other aspect of science and health.
Re:A New Kind of Science (Score:3, Interesting)
You're free to re-implement his algorithms in any language you want. He just made your job much easier if you happen to use Mathematica. If he didn't code his samples in Mathematica, people would point to it as proof that he doesn't use his own product.
Doug
Re:Or perhaps... (Score:4, Interesting)
> wants his place in history badly
It's a common thing for geniuses and almost-geniouses to flounder after their 'great moment' and inevitably turn to a "theory of everything".
Einstein, the highest genius of all, spent the rest of his life looking for a 'theory of everything'.
Even Edgar Allen Poe, a gifted albeit twisted writer, spend the bulk of his life trying to invent a 'theory of everything' to prove he wasn't just a horror writer.
Any more examples out there?
Re:New Kind of Hype? (Score:5, Interesting)
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) [wikipedia.org]
Re:Or perhaps... (Score:3, Interesting)
"Intelligent design" doesn't make any predictions about the nature of the universe. Because it makes no predictions, it is not falsifiable. Things that are not falsifiable cannot be examined with science, and can never be tested with science. Science books discuss science. "Intelligent design" is not science, and it cannot examined with science, so it doesn't belong in a science book.
Re:New Kind of Hype? (Score:4, Interesting)
The important part in Wolfram's work (and more importantly in the ohter people's works that were inspired by Wolfram) is quite different. It's not really "applicable" in the way you mention - the annoying side of Wolfram's book is precisely that he tries to apply it to just about anything, including fundamental physics.
Another annoying side is mentioning lot of works by other people without acknowledging them, except in the small-print notes that make up more than 50% of the book's contents. Yet another annoying side is the embarassing passage on evolution - even a reckless creationist (which Wolfram isn't) would be ashamed of coming up with such a laughable piece of bad reasoning. Go check if you don't believe me.
See my comment below for why Wolfram's ideas are actually cool, even though Wolfram himself isn't.
Thomas Miconi
Re:New Kind of Hype? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yea, scribbling on the back of 1192 envelopes. I bought the book and it was quite hefty, but tied together all of these ideas in a (over) descriptive manner. I enjoyed it.
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:1, Interesting)
Sure, the guy's brilliant. That doesn't make him right all the time. Or, maybe is _is_ right. I don't personally agree, but if he's just the proponent of a "theory", then he won't mind if people try to knock holes in said theory. that's what good science is all about: theory holding up under scrutiny. The problem is.. this isn't a throey to him. He's decided this is the way the universe works, and screw the idiots who might want to question that.
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Time to call your bluff (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:New Kind of Hype? (Score:4, Interesting)
As an armchair chaos mathematician, I find it annoying the one thing he DIDN'T try to apply it to: Chaos mathematics itself.
Think about it. He's got this neat way of mapping the generative rules of cellular automata into numbers, right? He can verify the Turing-completeness of each and every one of these automata. Are there patterns? Are there mathematical rules that can be derived, that say something like "Any automata mapped in such-and-such a way from the sum of two Mersenne primes will be Turing Complete", or even some bizzare formula that returns the Turing Completeness of any cellular automata generated by a number N.
Then look at THAT set of patterns, and see what 'rules' (which obviously themselves must be Turing complete) might generate THAT.
And down the rabbit-hole we go. Maybe Wolfram and Hopfstaedter should sit down for tea sometime.
Visualizing automata.. (Score:2, Interesting)
For fun, you might like to look at a java applet I wrote soon after this book came out. You plug in Wolfram's codes and it'll produce dependant automata like he describes in some chapters.
The applet is here [locoburger.org], at my personal website. Enjoy!
You may also notice the background image one of those automata. :)
Re:New Kind of Hype? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:New Kind of Hype? (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, in his second book (Shadows of the Mind) he (as far as I can tell) claims to prove that the human mind does things a universal Turing machine cannot and must therefore be based on different physics. Please correct me if I remember this wrong.
While I do not buy Penrose's argument, it is also not entirely clear to me, where it fails. The gist seemed to be: "In any formal system of logic there are statements that can be proven to be undecidable; however, we can see that they must be true, since if they were not, there would be a counterexample, which would make them decidable. Hence human reasoning is different from just following formal logic (which is what, supposedly, a computer following the laws of classical or quantum mechanics would do). Consequently the human brain must follow different laws - and quantum gravity seemed to be the [only|obvious] place left to look for them.
I really just couldn't hold any respect for him after reading The Emperor's New Mind, which is too bad since it's one of those "tour de force" books ala hofstadter
I think it is a great book, even though I disagree with his point on AI.
I don't think he should lose respect because of the ideas he has put forward, especially since he now tries to think up experiments on how to test his hypothesis [arxiv.org].
I do enjoy those laymans science books. Any you might recommend?
I enjoyed reading Deutsch "The Fabric of Reality" (although it is in places very speculative and I do not agree with several points) and Greene "The Elegant Universe" (cf. also the BBC tv series [pbs.org]).
Re:Time to call your bluff (Score:3, Interesting)