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Everytime i read stephen wolfram, i can never decide if he’s a genius on the brink of a groundbreaking discovery (emphasis on « on the brink », because i don’t

by bsaul 4y ago

Everytime i read stephen wolfram, i can never decide if he’s a genius on the brink of a groundbreaking discovery (emphasis on « on the brink », because i don’t think he has released anything proved to be groundbreaking yet), or just a former math wiz turned delusional. For example I bought his « new kind of physics » book when it was released, which was philosophically super interesting, yet it’s been 20 years and it looks like nothing came out of it. Note that i am not a physicist at all, so i wonder what’s the opinion of people actually doing research in the field.

evouga 4y ago
There is not really any new insight in the post, though cellular automata are indeed a good way to explain entropy, coarse-graining, etc. The breakthrough (if it exists) must be in his computational irreducibility theorem, which he alludes to in many places. Unfortunately the link is to a book chapter which doesn't render properly on mobile and seems more of a long ramble than a formal proof, so I didn't dig into it. An effective principle along the lines of, "if the output of a sufficiently simple program 'seems random,' then it is indistinguishable from random by all other programs," would be extraordinarily powerful and would immediately close many famous open problems, such as the normality of pi (and other numbers like sqrt(2)), infinitude of primes of the form x^2+1, the twin prime conjecture (and Dickson's conjecture), etc. It's somewhat telling that these are still open problems.
- ianai 4y ago
  Kind of wonder whether he could help the math world by starting a math college. Could be a stripped down program with basically one or two degree outputs. There is a LOT of math. It is unreasonably powerful at describing the world. But it’s also hard to cram into one single brain in a more rounded 4 year program. I’m also sure those same degrees would be economically viable as programmers and other professions with minimal added input.
breck 4y ago
He is a scientist in the finest sense: he collects lots of data and publishes that data for others to look at and think about for themselves. His blog is priceless. He does such great deep dives on historical thinkers (Leibniz comes to mind) and travels to where they lived and worked and publishes photos of their original works. Such a treasure. (And the products are neat too!)
deterministic 4y ago
I agree. My conclusion is that he is delusional. There are quite a few crazies on the internet who claims to be just on the brink of a major breakthrough. But they never actually get there. However it is much harder to tell with wolfram because he has actually achieved things in life.

by bsaul 4y ago

evouga 4y ago

There is not really any new insight in the post, though cellular automata are indeed a good way to explain entropy, coarse-graining, etc. The breakthrough (if it exists) must be in his computational irreducibility theorem, which he alludes to in many places. Unfortunately the link is to a book chapter which doesn't render properly on mobile and seems more of a long ramble than a formal proof, so I didn't dig into it. An effective principle along the lines of, "if the output of a sufficiently simple program 'seems random,' then it is indistinguishable from random by all other programs," would be extraordinarily powerful and would immediately close many famous open problems, such as the normality of pi (and other numbers like sqrt(2)), infinitude of primes of the form x^2+1, the twin prime conjecture (and Dickson's conjecture), etc. It's somewhat telling that these are still open problems.

ianai 4y ago
Kind of wonder whether he could help the math world by starting a math college. Could be a stripped down program with basically one or two degree outputs. There is a LOT of math. It is unreasonably powerful at describing the world. But it’s also hard to cram into one single brain in a more rounded 4 year program. I’m also sure those same degrees would be economically viable as programmers and other professions with minimal added input.

breck 4y ago

He is a scientist in the finest sense: he collects lots of data and publishes that data for others to look at and think about for themselves. His blog is priceless. He does such great deep dives on historical thinkers (Leibniz comes to mind) and travels to where they lived and worked and publishes photos of their original works. Such a treasure. (And the products are neat too!)

deterministic 4y ago

I agree. My conclusion is that he is delusional. There are quite a few crazies on the internet who claims to be just on the brink of a major breakthrough. But they never actually get there. However it is much harder to tell with wolfram because he has actually achieved things in life.