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For people who've read 'A New Kind of Science' on here...what did you think of it? I find that people's opinions of the book are quite polarized either they fo

For people who've read 'A New Kind of Science' on here...what did you think of it? I find that people's opinions of the book are quite polarized either they found it fascinating or were put-off by Wolfram's self-congratulating. So what does HN think?

danbmil99 16y ago
There is plenty to admire in the book but Wolfram's self-aggrandizing and complete lack of protocol wrt credit to others in the field is terribly off-putting. I think this book could have had far more impact if he had just bothered to tone down his ego and be charitable about prior work (whether or not he developed certain ideas independently; that doesn't excuse you from being honest about who did the work first)
- mithaler 16y ago
  On that note, here's one well-written but scathing review by a UMichigan professor who goes into that among other things: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/
  - jacobolus 16y ago
    Hilarious: “I'd have paid a lot to see Wolfram and Jacques Derrida go one-on-one.” Cosma Shalizi is a gem.
codeflo 16y ago
I think the split is between people who knew about cellular automata before reading the book, maybe even simulated their own cellular automata, and those who weren't familiar with the concept before. If you're in the former group, you'll find a lot of needless hyperbole about fairly standard results that were known for decades. Plus a few interesting ideas mixed in between. Plus even more hyperbole. If you're in the latter group, and didn't really know what cellular automata are about, your mind will be blown (and rightly so, these things are cool), and you won't mind Wolfram's tone so much.
Keyframe 16y ago
Here is a general thought about it. I think anyone who ever played with CA more seriously had a similar idea, but NKS took it a step further and tried to formalize it. It's an interesting read, with A LOT of bloat in the book. Actual book is damn huge, and IMO it could have easily been a book of ~300 pages at most. Aside from that, I think it's quite interesting and well worth a read, even if you're not into CA itself - that is, if you can navigate yourself around the bloat. I've read the book from a data compression/information complexity interest standpoint. So, I can't comment on it's pretensions over it's usefulness in all area of sciences.
Maro 16y ago
I bought the book back when it came out. It has two parts, the main text and the supplement, which is actually longer. I've read most of the main text. There's not much practically useful info in there that you couldn't pick up by reading good Wikipedia articles or other online articles, esp. now that the book has been our for years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton I'd still consider buying it for the iPad if it's cheap (<$10), just so I can browse and read it when I'm bored on the subway..
- Maro 16y ago
  It costs €8.
jacobolus 16y ago
My impression was that there were about 50 or 100 pages worth of insight, padded out and repeated over and over again to fill a 1100 page (or whatever) book. I only made it to about page 500 before giving up, feeling like I’d read the same part 3 or 4 times already, and just skimming the rest and looking at the pictures. Wolfram’ prose also oozes ego, which doesn’t help. Weinberg’s review in the New York Review was quite good: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2002/oct/24/is-the-universe-a-computer/?pagination=false http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2002/oct/24/is-the-...
- elblanco 16y ago
  I've worked under a person very much like Wolfram in terms of an ego so large they can't see the world around it. I remember having a product planning meeting one time where he went into a great detail about this sweeping plan he had come up with. With a great many diagrams and thought points and slides (oh the slides!), he described a system he believed would radically change humanity, advance the species etc. etc. etc. At the end of his speech, somebody asked, "aren't you just describing essentially this piece of technology <listing several extant examples>?" To which he paused for a good minute, minute and a half and responded "no! it's totally different!" It reminded me of the 7 minute abs routine. The problem was not that he hadn't come up with something interesting. It was that what he had come up with was something everybody had come up with. He had just spent so much time holed up in his office writing and making diagrams that he hadn't poked his head up into the world enough to realize that he hadn't come up with anything unique or interesting. This ego feeding manifested itself in all kinds of interesting ways. For example, his ego required that the things we were producing were unique based on what he knew. Even if we were building something that was essentially the same thing that everybody else in the world had built, he'd direct us to build it in some fashion that often ignored the practical results of good engineering practice (learned through thousands of iterations of trial and error over decades) and make it function in a way that was unique to our products, but not necessarily better, and because we were ignored so many hard lessons others had learned for us, often with significant downsides. Long after these things had been implemented, and the downsides of this approach were now readily apparent and in-your-face, we'd go back to him -- to which his reply would be, "I'll have a solution in the next version!" Months later he'd roll out his new development roadmap that failed entirely to address those issues, pretending like they had never been brought up (no Adoubt since they bruised his ego) and sent us off in another random, but already well understood direction, but cock angled so we'd end up making another round of well documented mistakes. A real simple example, instead of showing aggregate sums for discrete values in a data field as a simple bar chart, he insisted we use a different metaphor that had long since been abandoned by the field -- only he refused to acknowledge it. This fit the "novelty" requirement for his ego, but failed the "useful" part of building software. What finally ended it all was a perfect storm of past customers all coming and complaining that they weren't getting the product they were paying for. In some cases we'd even been paid to fix long outstanding problems created by our failure to design well understood parts of the software around well understood metaphors. The result is that he very quickly went to being "no longer with the company". My lessons from that experience is that innovation is important, but it has to be built on the solid foundation of past experience. Even Newton understood this, "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." The problem with something like "A New Kind of Science" is that it's not new. It's a study of the applications of a well understood field onto other fields. If it was written without ego the title would have been "A Study of the Applications of Cellular Automata and State Machines" or "Recognizing Computation in Cross-Domain Studies Using Cellular Automata", or the lofty "An Exhautive Review of Cellular Automata with Applications as Turing Machines." In other words, NKS brings us back to square one with Turing's "What is computable?" Only looked at from another angle. It's not that what's in the book isn't interesting, it is. It's that it's not revolutionary in the way Wolfram wishes it was. It's "merely" evolutionary and Wolfram refuses to understand that. And just like my old Boss always chided us with a "wait and see" and a twinkle in his eye whenever we pointed this out, Wolfram's response is "wait and see".
joeld42 16y ago
Really interesting collection of cool things you can do with Cellular Automata. I've implemented a few of the automata in the book for fun (they're all pretty simple), but I've yet to find a real-world use for any of it. If you don't take the "this will change the world and is the most important thing since math was invented" tone too seriously, it's pretty entertaining. And who's to say, it might turn into a revolution. Certainly the ideas about complexity theory he puts forth are interesting and worth thinking about. If I had to boil it down, it would be "Any system is either trivially simplistic, or complex enough to do anything." Think logic gates built with conway's game of life, or adders built with dwarf fortress pumps, that kind of thing. He's trying to unify all complex systems with cellular automata. That's my take on it, at least. Read it a while ago. If you're interested in cellular automata or complexity, it's worth reading. This would be really cool on the ipad if the illustrations were interactive, kind of like the NKS Explorer PC app he released a few years ago. That was a fun tool to play with this stuff.
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
I think Wolfram is onto something. He may have an ego the size of Texas, but my intuition tells me that it really is a new kind of science. I also think it might be 50 years or more before the mainstream community acknowledges it.
billmcneale 16y ago
I bought it on the day of release and I actually read the whole thing cover to cover. Not because it was good but because I was always expecting some kind of genius insight to appear. It never did. The book is filled with confused science, pretty graphics and massive ego stroking. Huge disappointment.
brendano 16y ago
The best review of New Kind of Science: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/

danbmil99 16y ago

There is plenty to admire in the book but Wolfram's self-aggrandizing and complete lack of protocol wrt credit to others in the field is terribly off-putting. I think this book could have had far more impact if he had just bothered to tone down his ego and be charitable about prior work (whether or not he developed certain ideas independently; that doesn't excuse you from being honest about who did the work first)

mithaler 16y ago
On that note, here's one well-written but scathing review by a UMichigan professor who goes into that among other things: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/
- jacobolus 16y ago
  Hilarious: “I'd have paid a lot to see Wolfram and Jacques Derrida go one-on-one.” Cosma Shalizi is a gem.

codeflo 16y ago

I think the split is between people who knew about cellular automata before reading the book, maybe even simulated their own cellular automata, and those who weren't familiar with the concept before. If you're in the former group, you'll find a lot of needless hyperbole about fairly standard results that were known for decades. Plus a few interesting ideas mixed in between. Plus even more hyperbole. If you're in the latter group, and didn't really know what cellular automata are about, your mind will be blown (and rightly so, these things are cool), and you won't mind Wolfram's tone so much.

Keyframe 16y ago

Here is a general thought about it. I think anyone who ever played with CA more seriously had a similar idea, but NKS took it a step further and tried to formalize it. It's an interesting read, with A LOT of bloat in the book. Actual book is damn huge, and IMO it could have easily been a book of ~300 pages at most. Aside from that, I think it's quite interesting and well worth a read, even if you're not into CA itself - that is, if you can navigate yourself around the bloat. I've read the book from a data compression/information complexity interest standpoint. So, I can't comment on it's pretensions over it's usefulness in all area of sciences.

Maro 16y ago

I bought the book back when it came out. It has two parts, the main text and the supplement, which is actually longer. I've read most of the main text. There's not much practically useful info in there that you couldn't pick up by reading good Wikipedia articles or other online articles, esp. now that the book has been our for years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton I'd still consider buying it for the iPad if it's cheap (<$10), just so I can browse and read it when I'm bored on the subway..

Maro 16y ago
It costs €8.

jacobolus 16y ago

My impression was that there were about 50 or 100 pages worth of insight, padded out and repeated over and over again to fill a 1100 page (or whatever) book. I only made it to about page 500 before giving up, feeling like I’d read the same part 3 or 4 times already, and just skimming the rest and looking at the pictures. Wolfram’ prose also oozes ego, which doesn’t help. Weinberg’s review in the New York Review was quite good: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2002/oct/24/is-the-universe-a-computer/?pagination=false http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2002/oct/24/is-the-...

elblanco 16y ago
I've worked under a person very much like Wolfram in terms of an ego so large they can't see the world around it. I remember having a product planning meeting one time where he went into a great detail about this sweeping plan he had come up with. With a great many diagrams and thought points and slides (oh the slides!), he described a system he believed would radically change humanity, advance the species etc. etc. etc. At the end of his speech, somebody asked, "aren't you just describing essentially this piece of technology <listing several extant examples>?" To which he paused for a good minute, minute and a half and responded "no! it's totally different!" It reminded me of the 7 minute abs routine. The problem was not that he hadn't come up with something interesting. It was that what he had come up with was something everybody had come up with. He had just spent so much time holed up in his office writing and making diagrams that he hadn't poked his head up into the world enough to realize that he hadn't come up with anything unique or interesting. This ego feeding manifested itself in all kinds of interesting ways. For example, his ego required that the things we were producing were unique based on what he knew. Even if we were building something that was essentially the same thing that everybody else in the world had built, he'd direct us to build it in some fashion that often ignored the practical results of good engineering practice (learned through thousands of iterations of trial and error over decades) and make it function in a way that was unique to our products, but not necessarily better, and because we were ignored so many hard lessons others had learned for us, often with significant downsides. Long after these things had been implemented, and the downsides of this approach were now readily apparent and in-your-face, we'd go back to him -- to which his reply would be, "I'll have a solution in the next version!" Months later he'd roll out his new development roadmap that failed entirely to address those issues, pretending like they had never been brought up (no Adoubt since they bruised his ego) and sent us off in another random, but already well understood direction, but cock angled so we'd end up making another round of well documented mistakes. A real simple example, instead of showing aggregate sums for discrete values in a data field as a simple bar chart, he insisted we use a different metaphor that had long since been abandoned by the field -- only he refused to acknowledge it. This fit the "novelty" requirement for his ego, but failed the "useful" part of building software. What finally ended it all was a perfect storm of past customers all coming and complaining that they weren't getting the product they were paying for. In some cases we'd even been paid to fix long outstanding problems created by our failure to design well understood parts of the software around well understood metaphors. The result is that he very quickly went to being "no longer with the company". My lessons from that experience is that innovation is important, but it has to be built on the solid foundation of past experience. Even Newton understood this, "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." The problem with something like "A New Kind of Science" is that it's not new. It's a study of the applications of a well understood field onto other fields. If it was written without ego the title would have been "A Study of the Applications of Cellular Automata and State Machines" or "Recognizing Computation in Cross-Domain Studies Using Cellular Automata", or the lofty "An Exhautive Review of Cellular Automata with Applications as Turing Machines." In other words, NKS brings us back to square one with Turing's "What is computable?" Only looked at from another angle. It's not that what's in the book isn't interesting, it is. It's that it's not revolutionary in the way Wolfram wishes it was. It's "merely" evolutionary and Wolfram refuses to understand that. And just like my old Boss always chided us with a "wait and see" and a twinkle in his eye whenever we pointed this out, Wolfram's response is "wait and see".

joeld42 16y ago

Really interesting collection of cool things you can do with Cellular Automata. I've implemented a few of the automata in the book for fun (they're all pretty simple), but I've yet to find a real-world use for any of it. If you don't take the "this will change the world and is the most important thing since math was invented" tone too seriously, it's pretty entertaining. And who's to say, it might turn into a revolution. Certainly the ideas about complexity theory he puts forth are interesting and worth thinking about. If I had to boil it down, it would be "Any system is either trivially simplistic, or complex enough to do anything." Think logic gates built with conway's game of life, or adders built with dwarf fortress pumps, that kind of thing. He's trying to unify all complex systems with cellular automata. That's my take on it, at least. Read it a while ago. If you're interested in cellular automata or complexity, it's worth reading. This would be really cool on the ipad if the illustrations were interactive, kind of like the NKS Explorer PC app he released a few years ago. That was a fun tool to play with this stuff.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

I think Wolfram is onto something. He may have an ego the size of Texas, but my intuition tells me that it really is a new kind of science. I also think it might be 50 years or more before the mainstream community acknowledges it.

billmcneale 16y ago

I bought it on the day of release and I actually read the whole thing cover to cover. Not because it was good but because I was always expecting some kind of genius insight to appear. It never did. The book is filled with confused science, pretty graphics and massive ego stroking. Huge disappointment.

brendano 16y ago

The best review of New Kind of Science: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/