5 ms·

Scott Aaronson tears NKS apart [pdf]

42 points by pookleblinky 17y ago

1gor 17y ago
Wolfram's talent for self-promotion has been nicely demonstrated by the publicity campaign ahead of his WolframAlpha launch. Multiple pre-announcements, screenshots, peek-reviews, demos have been appearing on NH for weeks already. Which may not be a bad thing, except it all comes at a price of credibility. Why does one need to create all that fuzz? Isn't it because the revolutionary product/idea cannot win followers and reputation solely on its merits? Same applies to his book. With a bit of modesty its impact could have been so much greater. Especially since its subject is indeed fascinating.
- pj 17y ago
  WA would have been much better off if they had slowly released it, gathered feedback and built up knowledge repositories. Why can't you get http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+college+graduates+are+in+the+u.s http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+college+gradua.... But you can get it for each university with http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=harvard+graduates http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=harvard+graduates Seems like it'd be a simple aggregate... Little things like this would be flushed out with a bit of testing over time. The hardest part for WA is going to be figuring out how people want to talk to it, and that will take time.
- slackenerny 17y ago
  Especially since its [ANKS] subject is indeed fascinating. It is not. Or at best in a sense that Pythagorean Harmony is. Subject has been explored to death long before ANKS. In sixties by every garden variety computer scientist, and in eighties by physicists, giving no insight for either science. Even as an art, his book was few years too late to "generative art" market.
  - Tichy 17y ago
    I find it fascinating.
    - slackenerny 17y ago
      And you're in a good company. Feynman for example found it fascinating too, that's why he worked at Thinking Machines and made first cellular automata based QCD simulations. Outcome of this popular fascination is now known as AI-winter.
      - Tichy 17y ago
        That surprises me. My impression was that AI from the AI-winter era has quite the opposite paradigm from NKS (or evolutionary methods or whatever). I thought it was more logic based.
        slackenerny 17y ago
        NKS (or evolutionary methods or whatever) That'd be it. Can you define the paradigm? State the idea and the method?
        Tichy 17y ago
        To me it is letting complex things emerge from simple rules (like ant paths emerging from simple behaviors of ants). The classical AI approach was more about modeling, knowledge representation, inference rules, decision trees and so on. The only thing related to NKS the classics dabbled with were neural networks. Most of them were also very restricted, though - in order to have a shot at analyzing them, the common neural networks have relatively simple structures. The idea of cellular automata is of course not from Wolfram, but he studied them to an impressive extent. To me they are just one variant of the theme, though. For me NKS is not the invention of evolutionary computation. But it portrays one part of it very well. And he argues that many things could be handled in that way, which was not obvious (I remember how he could imagine the real world to work like an cellular automaton, and still agree with quantum mechanics).
- mikedouglas 17y ago
  Since when has Hacker News, with its highly entrepreneurial core, ever so viciously attacked publicity? I haven't read NKS, so maybe I don't understand the depths of this man's capital offense, but I see nothing in your list that any smart business won't do. Maybe it isn't revolutionary (whatever that means), but it's a damn cool project that's going to be useful to a lot of people, and isn't that all we care about? Isn't it because the revolutionary product/idea cannot win followers and reputation solely on its merits? If the odds are worse without promotion, what rational human wouldn't use it?
  - wheels 17y ago
    Since when has Hacker News, with its highly entrepreneurial core, ever so viciously attacked publicity? I believe the last time was Cuil. Being able to work the hype machine is great, but if you generate more hype than you can deliver on it hurts your image. Since A New Kind of Science was similarly underwhelming, not to mention even more pretentiously hyped, many are cynical.
    - mikedouglas 17y ago
      I believe the last time was Cuil. Cuil's sin was failing at a solved problem, and most plainly, trying to be a "Google killer" (I believe they lectured Google on the size of their search database before they even launched). NLP answer engines aren't a solved problem, and WA was a pretty decent 1.0. Sure it failed techcrunch's vanity test, but for what Wolfram promised in those videos, it performs.
      - wheels 17y ago
        I think what you're saying is true, but it's orthogonal to my point. Both of them generated more hype than they delivered on in their launches and people were underwhelmed. That WA has more promise is a separate matter.
        slackenerny 17y ago
        It is interesting to parallel Wolfram with Thinking Machines founders. It is a rather little known fact that, trained through TM catastrophe, its founders went on to form a stealth company, called Ab Initio, which is wildly successful despite having no marketing. Indeed they're actively avoiding it through NDA contracts to the point that general public doesn't exactly know what exactly their products do. I am not ridiculing Wolfram, just wanted to point that above is as an interesting anecdote.
- huhtenberg 17y ago
  > Wolfram's talent for self-promotion has been nicely demonstrated by the publicity campaign ahead of his WolframAlpha launch. What makes you think it was Wolfram's talent per se and not that of some marketing exec ?
wheels 17y ago
Kurzweil's write-up on it is also good: http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0464.html?printable=1 http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0464.html?printable=1
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
I'm more impressed with the book than the review. It's a good review, no doubt, but I think Aaronson, while catching Wolfram using a bit of hyperbole on occasions, misses the essence of what NKS is. It's not simply a review of existing CS theory. The Feynman quote was quite illuminating. Wolfram does take the discrete conversation to the next step. He doesn't answer the questions, mainly because what he is proposing is, well, a New Kind of Science. Which means that there are going to be hundreds or thousands of questions. What might be missing the most is a methodology for exploration. But I think overall Wolfram is just a bit ahead of his time. Those things will be worked out.
- slackenerny 17y ago
  Because it was no review but an analysis. Review is when renowed reviewer gives his opinion which is backed by his authority. When your'e a poor grad student, like Aaronson in 2002, then you better withold emotional opinons and give facts. he is proposing And what Aaronson analyses is that book's statements form no proposal.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  He isn't remotely proposing a new kind of science. All he is proposing is to do regular science, but use cellular automata as a framework for new theories (rather than PDEs).
rw 17y ago
Thanks for the alley-oop? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=612002 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=612002
Sephr 17y ago
Until I read the PDF, I assumed this would be about Nobody Knows Shoes. It's better to abbreviate A New Kind of Science as ANKOS to avoid confusion.
- ninguem2 17y ago
  I prefer WANKOS (Wolfram's ANKOS...)
asciilifeform 17y ago
I prefer this review: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/
tophat02 17y ago
Wolfram is remarkably short-sighted. You'd think that such a smart guy would have realized that spending 1100+ pages blowing is own horn would tend to turn off the very people he hoped to convince. They say that love is blind, ego must just be plain blinding.
- asciilifeform 17y ago
  > You'd think that such a smart guy would have realized... This is the best theory I've seen yet to explain his behavior: http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math/msg/37f51351f5340e58?dmode=source&output=gplain http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math/msg/37f51351f5340e58... It makes a lot of sense, in light of the man's biography. See this: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ for an informed critic's perspective on the details.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
danbmil99 17y ago
Wolfram is a brilliant, egotistical, narcissistic credit hog. The history of science is littered with them. Some of the greatest discoveries of mankind are credited to the wrong people.
- gustavo_duarte 17y ago
  Can you give examples? I'm genuinely interested. Rosalind Franklin and DNA is about the only 'greatest discovery' I know of where I think credit wasn't given where it was due. Also, SW hasn't gotten anywhere near a 'greatest discovery', so I'm not sure the comparison is valid.
  - mnemonicsloth 17y ago
    Everyone likes to talk about the immortality that comes with proving an important mathematical result, but it's rarely that easy: The first publication on the Mobius strip was written by a guy named Listing, who did the same work as Mobius at the same time. I have to warn you that googling "Listing Strip" is slightly NSFW. Kalman was only the popularizer of the Kalman Filter. Grassman, who invented vector spaces and developed a lot of linear algebra, only got credit posthumously. Some people, like Fourier, only inspired the theory named for them. Modern theory is so much more general than classical theory that entire careers can be built by translating an old mathematical idea to a new domain. Sometimes, a new idea gets labeled as an extension to an existing idea if it so much as resembles an old idea. For example, the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation was Bellman's work. This is dangerous if you're after immortality -- there are very few ideas in math that aren't even slightly hinted at in the works of: Euler, Gauss, Jacobi, Hamilton, Lagrange, Laplace, etc. Sometimes, though, the new guys can usurp the old. When set theory being laid down as the core idea in all of mathematics, the mathematicians who reformulated ideas in rigorous set-theoretic language often got the new names. That's why we now have the Haar Measure instead of the Hurwitz Invariant Integral.

42 points by pookleblinky 17y ago

1gor 17y ago

Wolfram's talent for self-promotion has been nicely demonstrated by the publicity campaign ahead of his WolframAlpha launch. Multiple pre-announcements, screenshots, peek-reviews, demos have been appearing on NH for weeks already. Which may not be a bad thing, except it all comes at a price of credibility. Why does one need to create all that fuzz? Isn't it because the revolutionary product/idea cannot win followers and reputation solely on its merits? Same applies to his book. With a bit of modesty its impact could have been so much greater. Especially since its subject is indeed fascinating.

pj 17y ago
WA would have been much better off if they had slowly released it, gathered feedback and built up knowledge repositories. Why can't you get http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+college+graduates+are+in+the+u.s http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+college+gradua.... But you can get it for each university with http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=harvard+graduates http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=harvard+graduates Seems like it'd be a simple aggregate... Little things like this would be flushed out with a bit of testing over time. The hardest part for WA is going to be figuring out how people want to talk to it, and that will take time.
slackenerny 17y ago
Especially since its [ANKS] subject is indeed fascinating. It is not. Or at best in a sense that Pythagorean Harmony is. Subject has been explored to death long before ANKS. In sixties by every garden variety computer scientist, and in eighties by physicists, giving no insight for either science. Even as an art, his book was few years too late to "generative art" market.
- Tichy 17y ago
  I find it fascinating.
  - slackenerny 17y ago
    And you're in a good company. Feynman for example found it fascinating too, that's why he worked at Thinking Machines and made first cellular automata based QCD simulations. Outcome of this popular fascination is now known as AI-winter.
    - Tichy 17y ago
      That surprises me. My impression was that AI from the AI-winter era has quite the opposite paradigm from NKS (or evolutionary methods or whatever). I thought it was more logic based.
      - slackenerny 17y ago
        NKS (or evolutionary methods or whatever) That'd be it. Can you define the paradigm? State the idea and the method?
        Tichy 17y ago
        To me it is letting complex things emerge from simple rules (like ant paths emerging from simple behaviors of ants). The classical AI approach was more about modeling, knowledge representation, inference rules, decision trees and so on. The only thing related to NKS the classics dabbled with were neural networks. Most of them were also very restricted, though - in order to have a shot at analyzing them, the common neural networks have relatively simple structures. The idea of cellular automata is of course not from Wolfram, but he studied them to an impressive extent. To me they are just one variant of the theme, though. For me NKS is not the invention of evolutionary computation. But it portrays one part of it very well. And he argues that many things could be handled in that way, which was not obvious (I remember how he could imagine the real world to work like an cellular automaton, and still agree with quantum mechanics).
mikedouglas 17y ago
Since when has Hacker News, with its highly entrepreneurial core, ever so viciously attacked publicity? I haven't read NKS, so maybe I don't understand the depths of this man's capital offense, but I see nothing in your list that any smart business won't do. Maybe it isn't revolutionary (whatever that means), but it's a damn cool project that's going to be useful to a lot of people, and isn't that all we care about? Isn't it because the revolutionary product/idea cannot win followers and reputation solely on its merits? If the odds are worse without promotion, what rational human wouldn't use it?
- wheels 17y ago
  Since when has Hacker News, with its highly entrepreneurial core, ever so viciously attacked publicity? I believe the last time was Cuil. Being able to work the hype machine is great, but if you generate more hype than you can deliver on it hurts your image. Since A New Kind of Science was similarly underwhelming, not to mention even more pretentiously hyped, many are cynical.
  - mikedouglas 17y ago
    I believe the last time was Cuil. Cuil's sin was failing at a solved problem, and most plainly, trying to be a "Google killer" (I believe they lectured Google on the size of their search database before they even launched). NLP answer engines aren't a solved problem, and WA was a pretty decent 1.0. Sure it failed techcrunch's vanity test, but for what Wolfram promised in those videos, it performs.
    - wheels 17y ago
      I think what you're saying is true, but it's orthogonal to my point. Both of them generated more hype than they delivered on in their launches and people were underwhelmed. That WA has more promise is a separate matter.
      - slackenerny 17y ago
        It is interesting to parallel Wolfram with Thinking Machines founders. It is a rather little known fact that, trained through TM catastrophe, its founders went on to form a stealth company, called Ab Initio, which is wildly successful despite having no marketing. Indeed they're actively avoiding it through NDA contracts to the point that general public doesn't exactly know what exactly their products do. I am not ridiculing Wolfram, just wanted to point that above is as an interesting anecdote.
huhtenberg 17y ago
> Wolfram's talent for self-promotion has been nicely demonstrated by the publicity campaign ahead of his WolframAlpha launch. What makes you think it was Wolfram's talent per se and not that of some marketing exec ?

wheels 17y ago

Kurzweil's write-up on it is also good: http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0464.html?printable=1 http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0464.html?printable=1

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

I'm more impressed with the book than the review. It's a good review, no doubt, but I think Aaronson, while catching Wolfram using a bit of hyperbole on occasions, misses the essence of what NKS is. It's not simply a review of existing CS theory. The Feynman quote was quite illuminating. Wolfram does take the discrete conversation to the next step. He doesn't answer the questions, mainly because what he is proposing is, well, a New Kind of Science. Which means that there are going to be hundreds or thousands of questions. What might be missing the most is a methodology for exploration. But I think overall Wolfram is just a bit ahead of his time. Those things will be worked out.

slackenerny 17y ago
Because it was no review but an analysis. Review is when renowed reviewer gives his opinion which is backed by his authority. When your'e a poor grad student, like Aaronson in 2002, then you better withold emotional opinons and give facts. he is proposing And what Aaronson analyses is that book's statements form no proposal.
yummyfajitas 17y ago
He isn't remotely proposing a new kind of science. All he is proposing is to do regular science, but use cellular automata as a framework for new theories (rather than PDEs).

rw 17y ago

Thanks for the alley-oop? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=612002 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=612002

Sephr 17y ago

Until I read the PDF, I assumed this would be about Nobody Knows Shoes. It's better to abbreviate A New Kind of Science as ANKOS to avoid confusion.

ninguem2 17y ago
I prefer WANKOS (Wolfram's ANKOS...)

asciilifeform 17y ago

I prefer this review: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/

tophat02 17y ago

Wolfram is remarkably short-sighted. You'd think that such a smart guy would have realized that spending 1100+ pages blowing is own horn would tend to turn off the very people he hoped to convince. They say that love is blind, ego must just be plain blinding.

asciilifeform 17y ago
> You'd think that such a smart guy would have realized... This is the best theory I've seen yet to explain his behavior: http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math/msg/37f51351f5340e58?dmode=source&output=gplain http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math/msg/37f51351f5340e58... It makes a lot of sense, in light of the man's biography. See this: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ for an informed critic's perspective on the details.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

danbmil99 17y ago

Wolfram is a brilliant, egotistical, narcissistic credit hog. The history of science is littered with them. Some of the greatest discoveries of mankind are credited to the wrong people.

gustavo_duarte 17y ago
Can you give examples? I'm genuinely interested. Rosalind Franklin and DNA is about the only 'greatest discovery' I know of where I think credit wasn't given where it was due. Also, SW hasn't gotten anywhere near a 'greatest discovery', so I'm not sure the comparison is valid.
- mnemonicsloth 17y ago
  Everyone likes to talk about the immortality that comes with proving an important mathematical result, but it's rarely that easy: The first publication on the Mobius strip was written by a guy named Listing, who did the same work as Mobius at the same time. I have to warn you that googling "Listing Strip" is slightly NSFW. Kalman was only the popularizer of the Kalman Filter. Grassman, who invented vector spaces and developed a lot of linear algebra, only got credit posthumously. Some people, like Fourier, only inspired the theory named for them. Modern theory is so much more general than classical theory that entire careers can be built by translating an old mathematical idea to a new domain. Sometimes, a new idea gets labeled as an extension to an existing idea if it so much as resembles an old idea. For example, the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation was Bellman's work. This is dangerous if you're after immortality -- there are very few ideas in math that aren't even slightly hinted at in the works of: Euler, Gauss, Jacobi, Hamilton, Lagrange, Laplace, etc. Sometimes, though, the new guys can usurp the old. When set theory being laid down as the core idea in all of mathematics, the mathematicians who reformulated ideas in rigorous set-theoretic language often got the new names. That's why we now have the Haar Measure instead of the Hurwitz Invariant Integral.