>I've never heard this work described that way before. One way to summarize the thesis of book would be to say: Historically, we've analyzed natural phenomena

>I've never heard this work described that way before. One way to summarize the thesis of book would be to say: Historically, we've analyzed natural phenomena and tried to fit equations to the data. But Nature may be doing something analagous to running simple programs instead of solving equations. What are the implications of this? Complexity and "randomness" comes about from the "programs", not from their initial inputs/conditions. And predicting behavior of programs is harder than predicting behavior of systems of equations, which sucks. >but not any kind of science I think many people who aren't familiar with the book are thinking that "a new kind of science" means "a new branch of science" like we have physics, chemistry, biology, and now this new "computery" science. But the book is actually about looking at nature with the new perspective of "programs", that previous generations of people didn't have a reference frame for. And some of things that we think are "complex" might actually be following simple rules (or can better be modeled as such).