5 ms·

Btw did "a new kind of science" had any kind of application so far ?

by bsaul 13y ago

joeld42 13y ago
I don't know, and it certainly feels kind of silly reading the prologue where it promises to reinvent everything, but I found that book to be fascinating and thought provoking. It didn't change the world but a lot of people are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, there's a lot of good stuff in there. If he had renamed it "Cellular Automata are fun!" or something less bombastic, it would be an instant classic. Also, I think the key insight is pretty deep -- systems are either trivially simple, or limitlessly complex, once you reach a (very low) level of complexity, you can do pretty much anything.
xradionut 13y ago
I got a surplus stack of them that was scrapped at a bookstore to press flowers... As for his post, it should have been titled: "A New Kind of Programming Language".
- chriswarbo 13y ago
  Or "A New Implementation of LISP"...
taliesinb 13y ago
I'm a Wolfram science summer school instructor, so I'm in a position to see the kinds of trends there are towards NKS-style methods. It's slow, but definitely there. Some of it is directly inspired, some of it is 'convergent evolution'. Here's a very high-level and eclectic list of themes and specific research directions I can remember off-hand: agent-based modeling in economics and operational research, game theory automata in evolutionary biology, lattice gas methods in fluid dynamics, tessellation-based approaches to solving PDAs, L-systems in architectural design, logic automata for programming array-based computers, cellular automata-based PRNGs for stream ciphers, program search for finding lock-free concurrent algorithms, rBMs as used in deep learning. In fact, I used an exhaustive NKS-style search the other day to find novel data query primitives (i.e. what other functions live in the type-signature space that MapReduce occupies?).
- doop 13y ago
  I was under the impression that lattice gas methods in CFD were more or less obsolete. They're nice in that they're unconditionally stable and only use bitwise operations, but the amount of CPU time you save from this is massively outweighed by the number of simulation runs you need to do to average out the noise. They're also not Galilean invariant (at least not without messing around with rescaling factors). Lattice Boltzmann is much more practical.
  - taliesinb 13y ago
    Right, but fundamentally Lattice Boltzmann is just an optimization on top of lattice gas automata. It's continuum-ing up from a CA rather than discretizing down from Navier-Stokes. And the Galilean invariance thing is kinda cool: who knew that you didn't need something as fundamental as Galilean invariance?
    - doop 13y ago
      You can see it as continuum-ing up from a CA, or you can see it as a discretization of the continuum Boltzmann equation. What do you mean you don't need Galilean invariance? In the real world, fluid motion is Galilean invariant (unless you're talking relativistic motion, which is a whole other class of thing that lattice gases have trouble with). You might be simulating something but it sure ain't a Navier-Stokes fluid.
      - taliesinb 13y ago
        Aha! Physical fluids aren't Naiver Stokes, which is just a continuum approximation that was invented before atoms were even a scientifically established idea. Which of course you know already, but it means it is begging the question a little to say "you might be simulating something but it sure ain't a Navier-Stokes fluid". For Galilean invariance, I've previously waxed philosophic about why I think that's a feature, not a bug (at least, pedagogically): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5931434 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5931434
mathattack 13y ago
Did it struggle to change the world because he lost interest, and focused on other things afterwards? It seems like he has an awful lot of balls in the air, which might mean long intellectual leaps, but not the legwork behind them.

Btw did "a new kind of science" had any kind of application so far ?

by bsaul 13y ago

Btw did "a new kind of science" had any kind of application so far ?

I don't know, and it certainly feels kind of silly reading the prologue where it promises to reinvent everything, but I found that book to be fascinating and thought provoking. It didn't change the world but a lot of people are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, there's a lot of good stuff in there. If he had renamed it "Cellular Automata are fun!" or something less bombastic, it would be an instant classic. Also, I think the key insight is pretty deep -- systems are either trivially simple, or limitlessly complex, once you reach a (very low) level of complexity, you can do pretty much anything.

xradionut 13y ago

I got a surplus stack of them that was scrapped at a bookstore to press flowers... As for his post, it should have been titled: "A New Kind of Programming Language".

chriswarbo 13y ago
Or "A New Implementation of LISP"...

taliesinb 13y ago

I'm a Wolfram science summer school instructor, so I'm in a position to see the kinds of trends there are towards NKS-style methods. It's slow, but definitely there. Some of it is directly inspired, some of it is 'convergent evolution'. Here's a very high-level and eclectic list of themes and specific research directions I can remember off-hand: agent-based modeling in economics and operational research, game theory automata in evolutionary biology, lattice gas methods in fluid dynamics, tessellation-based approaches to solving PDAs, L-systems in architectural design, logic automata for programming array-based computers, cellular automata-based PRNGs for stream ciphers, program search for finding lock-free concurrent algorithms, rBMs as used in deep learning. In fact, I used an exhaustive NKS-style search the other day to find novel data query primitives (i.e. what other functions live in the type-signature space that MapReduce occupies?).

doop 13y ago
I was under the impression that lattice gas methods in CFD were more or less obsolete. They're nice in that they're unconditionally stable and only use bitwise operations, but the amount of CPU time you save from this is massively outweighed by the number of simulation runs you need to do to average out the noise. They're also not Galilean invariant (at least not without messing around with rescaling factors). Lattice Boltzmann is much more practical.
- taliesinb 13y ago
  Right, but fundamentally Lattice Boltzmann is just an optimization on top of lattice gas automata. It's continuum-ing up from a CA rather than discretizing down from Navier-Stokes. And the Galilean invariance thing is kinda cool: who knew that you didn't need something as fundamental as Galilean invariance?
  - doop 13y ago
    You can see it as continuum-ing up from a CA, or you can see it as a discretization of the continuum Boltzmann equation. What do you mean you don't need Galilean invariance? In the real world, fluid motion is Galilean invariant (unless you're talking relativistic motion, which is a whole other class of thing that lattice gases have trouble with). You might be simulating something but it sure ain't a Navier-Stokes fluid.
    - taliesinb 13y ago
      Aha! Physical fluids aren't Naiver Stokes, which is just a continuum approximation that was invented before atoms were even a scientifically established idea. Which of course you know already, but it means it is begging the question a little to say "you might be simulating something but it sure ain't a Navier-Stokes fluid". For Galilean invariance, I've previously waxed philosophic about why I think that's a feature, not a bug (at least, pedagogically): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5931434 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5931434

mathattack 13y ago

Did it struggle to change the world because he lost interest, and focused on other things afterwards? It seems like he has an awful lot of balls in the air, which might mean long intellectual leaps, but not the legwork behind them.