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I found it to be a very interesting book. The criticisms basically boil down into three categories: - I don't like Stephen Wolfram and his personal style offe

by xrange 9y ago

I found it to be a very interesting book. The criticisms basically boil down into three categories: - I don't like Stephen Wolfram and his personal style offends me. - This isn't new material because there were academic papers that covered some of this material scattered throughout the literature. - Stephen should have been more generous in giving credit to previous work. ...If nothing else, get a copy to look at all the great pictures, and ignore the text if it bothers you. >most concerning being the lack of mathematical rigor in the work This book is about how very very simple programs can end up producing complex results. You can easily write the program for simulating the cellular automata in any programming language and check that you get the same picture as shown in the book. You don't have to accept anyone's philosophy of math and their opinions on the Axiom of Choice when it comes to uncountable infinities. It is completely formal. In fact, the best reason for getting the book is to encourage you to write tiny little programs to see the results for yourself. http://math.wikia.com/wiki/Mathematical_rigor http://math.wikia.com/wiki/Mathematical_rigor

jerf 9y ago
My primary criticism with the book is that it repeatedly unto belaboring the point claims to be "a new kind of science", when in fact it turns out it's merely a somewhat interesting tour of some corners of recreational mathematics that has had zero impact on the world and will likely continue to have zero impact on the world. As a book of recreational mathematics it's pretty fun. As a "New Kind Of Science" it's atrocious.
- xrange 9y ago
  >As a "New Kind Of Science" it's atrocious. Investigating nature starting with the premise that the "laws" may be imperative procedures instead of pure functions doesn't seem orthodox (for 2002), so isn't that "new"?
  - DanBC 9y ago
    Boids (1986) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids Langton's Ant (1986) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton%27s_ant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton%27s_ant Avida (1993) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avida Tierra (early 1990s) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation) Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fractal_Geometry_of_Nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fractal_Geometry_of_Nature I dunno, some of these seem to be doing it much earlier than 2002.
    - cr0sh 9y ago
      I'd be willing to bet that at one point or another, Wolfram likely mentions all of these prior works. One also has to realize that Wolfram actually started thinking about this whole thing much earlier (35 years or so ago) than many of these other authors, and wrote papers about such. That isn't to say these other works aren't original, or that there wasn't art prior to even then. Finally, Wolfram throughout the book notes that his ideas aren't new or original in whole - he actually belabors on this repeatedly (so much so, it became tiring for me to read it - it seemed like it was every other page).
  - jerf 9y ago
    It hasn't produced any fruit. And especially from a retrospective perspective, the importance of that can't be understated. I'm not enough of a mathematician to be able to do this myself, but intuitively I expect that there must be some way to measure the chaoticness of a program-type mathematical system, the degree to which small perturbations in the input produce large changes in the output. We are familiar with this in practice in the programming world in the difference between languages like J or a fluffier language like Java. Within the domain of legal programs, perturbations in the original symbol stream are more likely to have larger effects on programs in J than in Java. My personal feeling, after watching people sort of screw around with CAs for the last many years (only recently unsubscribed from /r/cellular_automata) is that CA are simply too chaotic to be useful for any non-trivial purpose; the task of establishing correlation between a real physical outcome and a CA is too difficult, and then even if you do, the task of understanding the CA itself is still itself quite large! It just isn't a useful way of modeling the world. Or, if you prefer, the problem isn't that CAs are too simple to model things with, the problem is that in general they are too complex. Either a CA is degenerately simple or impossibly chaotic and there just isn't enough in between. The same characteristics that makes it fun to watch a CA explode from a very small seed into a complex diagram that is still somehow obviously structured in strangely complex ways makes it impossible to actually make them do anything you want to do. Go look at the Turing machine implemented in Life. Look at the sheer size of the thing. It's a bit of a cheat because it is simulating something else that we already have models for, but... could you imagine trying to understand the behavior of Turing Machines through the lens of that Life model? Another interesting thing to look at is the way people sometimes try to incorporate CAs into video games. It turns out they are very, very hard to tame into anything useful, without a lot of work spent constraining them down to something tractable. Or, in other words, by stripping out all their power just so they might do something slightly predictable. Turing machines are a much better model of computation than CAs are of very many other real processes, and in practice, Turing machines are still virtually useless, useful only for the theoretical pleasingness of the UTM and the resulting mathematical theorems, but not something we use on a day-to-day basis. Lambda calculus is way more useful, and even more useful than that is just the adhoc models we tend to use day-by-day that may lack nice mathematical properties but actually resemble the machines we work with. CAs have an even larger gap between their sheer mathematical perversity on the one hand, and any useful application on the other.
BeetleB 9y ago
You forgot another criticism: The repeated plug for Mathematica every 3-4 pages. I couldn't get past 10% of the book before I got sick of the "Look how great Mathematica is for describing these algorithms!"
- qubex 9y ago
  Mathematica is pretty great, but just about any Turing-complete non-esoteric language will suffice for concisely expressing his ’insights’ and doing his ’experiments’. I suppose the lack of boilerplate code made possible by the behind-the-scenes environment is useful (from a practical standpoint), though.
cr0sh 9y ago
The thing I found after reading it, in regards to your list of criticisms - is that for the last two, Wolfram spent what felt like every other page (it wasn't literally that, but it was very, very often) expounding upon how the material wasn't new, and that he wasn't being original with it, and as far as credit is concerned - did any of these people bother to go to the back of the book and look at the HUGE pile of "footnotes" (they are printed much smaller, because there are so damn many that to print them at the same size would mean to print at least one or two more books the same size as the main text!). I honestly tend to wonder if the people who are complaining about the book actually bothered to read it in its entirety, and understand the information and ideas being conveyed? So far, I'm not convinced they have, but I'm willing to change my mind if someone can point to a review or argument against it that holds up. The only one I've seen espoused by anyone (and was mentioned by a commenter here) is that the book doesn't actually do any "science" - but if you read the book, you would understand that this is an impossibility based on the premise of the work.
- xrange 9y ago
  >I honestly tend to wonder if the people who are complaining about the book actually bothered to read it in its entirety, and understand the information and ideas being conveyed? I've always wondered if there was a psychological component to it -- as in certain personality types get personally offended by Wolfram's prose. I'm certainly curious if there would be any correlation between liking/disliking the book and some sort of Meyers-Briggs type personality assessment. Maybe it is an INTJ vs. INTP type of thing?
  - qubex 9y ago
    I'm an INTJ and I... ...have been excited by computational thinking ever since I read The Computational Beauty Of Nature whilst in High School in 1998 ...am an avid Mathematica user ...found Wolfram's arguments pretty trite and obvious, couched in self-aggrandising hand-waving ...found the book's prose style to be absolutely maddening ...slogged through the whole damned tome (footnotes included) in a desperate attempt to extract some insight from it

by xrange 9y ago

jerf 9y ago

My primary criticism with the book is that it repeatedly unto belaboring the point claims to be "a new kind of science", when in fact it turns out it's merely a somewhat interesting tour of some corners of recreational mathematics that has had zero impact on the world and will likely continue to have zero impact on the world. As a book of recreational mathematics it's pretty fun. As a "New Kind Of Science" it's atrocious.

xrange 9y ago
>As a "New Kind Of Science" it's atrocious. Investigating nature starting with the premise that the "laws" may be imperative procedures instead of pure functions doesn't seem orthodox (for 2002), so isn't that "new"?
- DanBC 9y ago
  Boids (1986) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids Langton's Ant (1986) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton%27s_ant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton%27s_ant Avida (1993) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avida Tierra (early 1990s) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation) Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fractal_Geometry_of_Nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fractal_Geometry_of_Nature I dunno, some of these seem to be doing it much earlier than 2002.
  - cr0sh 9y ago
    I'd be willing to bet that at one point or another, Wolfram likely mentions all of these prior works. One also has to realize that Wolfram actually started thinking about this whole thing much earlier (35 years or so ago) than many of these other authors, and wrote papers about such. That isn't to say these other works aren't original, or that there wasn't art prior to even then. Finally, Wolfram throughout the book notes that his ideas aren't new or original in whole - he actually belabors on this repeatedly (so much so, it became tiring for me to read it - it seemed like it was every other page).
- jerf 9y ago
  It hasn't produced any fruit. And especially from a retrospective perspective, the importance of that can't be understated. I'm not enough of a mathematician to be able to do this myself, but intuitively I expect that there must be some way to measure the chaoticness of a program-type mathematical system, the degree to which small perturbations in the input produce large changes in the output. We are familiar with this in practice in the programming world in the difference between languages like J or a fluffier language like Java. Within the domain of legal programs, perturbations in the original symbol stream are more likely to have larger effects on programs in J than in Java. My personal feeling, after watching people sort of screw around with CAs for the last many years (only recently unsubscribed from /r/cellular_automata) is that CA are simply too chaotic to be useful for any non-trivial purpose; the task of establishing correlation between a real physical outcome and a CA is too difficult, and then even if you do, the task of understanding the CA itself is still itself quite large! It just isn't a useful way of modeling the world. Or, if you prefer, the problem isn't that CAs are too simple to model things with, the problem is that in general they are too complex. Either a CA is degenerately simple or impossibly chaotic and there just isn't enough in between. The same characteristics that makes it fun to watch a CA explode from a very small seed into a complex diagram that is still somehow obviously structured in strangely complex ways makes it impossible to actually make them do anything you want to do. Go look at the Turing machine implemented in Life. Look at the sheer size of the thing. It's a bit of a cheat because it is simulating something else that we already have models for, but... could you imagine trying to understand the behavior of Turing Machines through the lens of that Life model? Another interesting thing to look at is the way people sometimes try to incorporate CAs into video games. It turns out they are very, very hard to tame into anything useful, without a lot of work spent constraining them down to something tractable. Or, in other words, by stripping out all their power just so they might do something slightly predictable. Turing machines are a much better model of computation than CAs are of very many other real processes, and in practice, Turing machines are still virtually useless, useful only for the theoretical pleasingness of the UTM and the resulting mathematical theorems, but not something we use on a day-to-day basis. Lambda calculus is way more useful, and even more useful than that is just the adhoc models we tend to use day-by-day that may lack nice mathematical properties but actually resemble the machines we work with. CAs have an even larger gap between their sheer mathematical perversity on the one hand, and any useful application on the other.

BeetleB 9y ago

You forgot another criticism: The repeated plug for Mathematica every 3-4 pages. I couldn't get past 10% of the book before I got sick of the "Look how great Mathematica is for describing these algorithms!"

qubex 9y ago
Mathematica is pretty great, but just about any Turing-complete non-esoteric language will suffice for concisely expressing his ’insights’ and doing his ’experiments’. I suppose the lack of boilerplate code made possible by the behind-the-scenes environment is useful (from a practical standpoint), though.

cr0sh 9y ago

The thing I found after reading it, in regards to your list of criticisms - is that for the last two, Wolfram spent what felt like every other page (it wasn't literally that, but it was very, very often) expounding upon how the material wasn't new, and that he wasn't being original with it, and as far as credit is concerned - did any of these people bother to go to the back of the book and look at the HUGE pile of "footnotes" (they are printed much smaller, because there are so damn many that to print them at the same size would mean to print at least one or two more books the same size as the main text!). I honestly tend to wonder if the people who are complaining about the book actually bothered to read it in its entirety, and understand the information and ideas being conveyed? So far, I'm not convinced they have, but I'm willing to change my mind if someone can point to a review or argument against it that holds up. The only one I've seen espoused by anyone (and was mentioned by a commenter here) is that the book doesn't actually do any "science" - but if you read the book, you would understand that this is an impossibility based on the premise of the work.

xrange 9y ago
>I honestly tend to wonder if the people who are complaining about the book actually bothered to read it in its entirety, and understand the information and ideas being conveyed? I've always wondered if there was a psychological component to it -- as in certain personality types get personally offended by Wolfram's prose. I'm certainly curious if there would be any correlation between liking/disliking the book and some sort of Meyers-Briggs type personality assessment. Maybe it is an INTJ vs. INTP type of thing?
- qubex 9y ago
  I'm an INTJ and I... ...have been excited by computational thinking ever since I read The Computational Beauty Of Nature whilst in High School in 1998 ...am an avid Mathematica user ...found Wolfram's arguments pretty trite and obvious, couched in self-aggrandising hand-waving ...found the book's prose style to be absolutely maddening ...slogged through the whole damned tome (footnotes included) in a desperate attempt to extract some insight from it