[om-list] The Book "A New Kind of Science"

[Rex Butler]

Mark, Luke,

I haven't read the book personally, but from reading the summary and other 
people's impressions of the book I'm less than impressed.  Wolfram's thesis 
should be that CA are vastly underestimated, not that (Wolfram's, not anyone 
else's) ideas about CA will "revolutionize science."  The ideas of chaos and 
emergence in CA are well known and well established.  That you can compute 
and simulate with CA isn't that remarkable either.  The fact of the matter 
is, you can convert any question of in one area of math into a question in 
another area of math, algorithmically even, but you only gain something when 
the correspondence is natural.

I'm sure the book is remarkable exposistion of the topic, with a lot of 
fresh ideas.  Still, we've heard the simplicity --> complexity, emergence, 
chaos, etc, etc mantra before.

Wolfram uses the words "my" and "I" much to often, and his arrogance is 
irritating.  Quite simply, The book should have been named "The Power of 
Cellular Automaton".  Besides, the best way to avoid revolutionizing science 
is to claim you will.

Rex Butler


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