The general criticism of Wolfram's book is that it's heavy on pictures and self-praise and comparatively light on content. It's certainly very pretty, and has s

The general criticism of Wolfram's book is that it's heavy on pictures and self-praise and comparatively light on content. It's certainly very pretty, and has some interesting results (e.g. that Rule 110 is Turing-complete) but a lot of the work is summary or rehash of other extant (and often non-cited) material. There are often more thorough, more concise, and more lucid resources on cellular automata from other research; I'd cite Zuse's Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space) off the top of my head for a work that comes to many of Wolfram's conclusions several decades prior to Wolfram. In fact, a good strategy for becoming familiar with cellular automata as a field is to read reviews of ANKOS by people with degrees[1], collect the works and authors mentioned, and trawl them. You'll learn a lot about a lot that way. [1]: http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html has an extensive selection of such reviews. EDIT: It's also worthy of note here that Wolfram would reject the original post's model as not worthwhile, as ANKOS explicitly argues that we should reject continuous models in favor of discrete models; indeed, that is the very definition of his "new kind of science."