Jason McCullough
07-25-2006, 09:02 PM
I thought this (http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/) was illuminating and funny.
Attention conservation notice: Once, I was one of the authors of a paper on cellular automata. Lawyers for Wolfram Research Inc. threatened to sue me, my co-authors and our employer, because one of our citations referred to a certain mathematical proof, and they claimed the existence of this proof was a trade secret of Wolfram Research. I am sorry to say that our employer knuckled under, and so did we, and we replaced that version of the paper with another, without the offending citation. I think my judgments on Wolfram and his works are accurate, but they're not disinterested.
With that out of the way: it is my considered, professional opinion that A New Kind of Science shows that Wolfram has become a crank in the classic mold, which is a shame, since he's a really bright man, and once upon a time did some good math, even if he has always been arrogant.
.....This is a genuinely new result. Rule 110 is the simplest CA (in terms of the number of states and the rule radius) which is known to support universal computation. (Indeed, in his 1985 book on cellular automata, Wolfram declared that universal computation in an elementary CA was obviously impossible.) However, lots of things are capable of universal computation — there's less interest in this kind of result than there was in, say, 1970. In 1990, for instance, Cristopher Moore (http://www.santafe.edu/%7Emoore/) devised a kind of idealized pin-ball machine which is capable of universal computation (http://www.santafe.edu/%7Emoore/pubs/gs.html). This result, like the one about rule 110, is neat for people who care about dynamical models of universal computation — on the order of a thousand scientists and mathematicians world wide. What Wolfram wants to claim is that, since one universal computer is equivalent to another, by studying the behavior of one we learn things which are true of all others (true), therefore Rule 110 is as complex as anything in the universe, and all intelligent life, including, perhaps, the gods must have much in common. This, to put it mildly, does not follow. Wolfram even goes on to refute post-modernism on this basis; I won't touch that except to say that I'd have paid a lot to see Wolfram and Jacques Derrida go one-on-one.
Attention conservation notice: Once, I was one of the authors of a paper on cellular automata. Lawyers for Wolfram Research Inc. threatened to sue me, my co-authors and our employer, because one of our citations referred to a certain mathematical proof, and they claimed the existence of this proof was a trade secret of Wolfram Research. I am sorry to say that our employer knuckled under, and so did we, and we replaced that version of the paper with another, without the offending citation. I think my judgments on Wolfram and his works are accurate, but they're not disinterested.
With that out of the way: it is my considered, professional opinion that A New Kind of Science shows that Wolfram has become a crank in the classic mold, which is a shame, since he's a really bright man, and once upon a time did some good math, even if he has always been arrogant.
.....This is a genuinely new result. Rule 110 is the simplest CA (in terms of the number of states and the rule radius) which is known to support universal computation. (Indeed, in his 1985 book on cellular automata, Wolfram declared that universal computation in an elementary CA was obviously impossible.) However, lots of things are capable of universal computation — there's less interest in this kind of result than there was in, say, 1970. In 1990, for instance, Cristopher Moore (http://www.santafe.edu/%7Emoore/) devised a kind of idealized pin-ball machine which is capable of universal computation (http://www.santafe.edu/%7Emoore/pubs/gs.html). This result, like the one about rule 110, is neat for people who care about dynamical models of universal computation — on the order of a thousand scientists and mathematicians world wide. What Wolfram wants to claim is that, since one universal computer is equivalent to another, by studying the behavior of one we learn things which are true of all others (true), therefore Rule 110 is as complex as anything in the universe, and all intelligent life, including, perhaps, the gods must have much in common. This, to put it mildly, does not follow. Wolfram even goes on to refute post-modernism on this basis; I won't touch that except to say that I'd have paid a lot to see Wolfram and Jacques Derrida go one-on-one.