Rating: 
Summary: The Most Profound Idea Ever Conceived
Review: Many who praise Stephen Wolfram's genius compare him to Charles Darwin and Sir Isaac Newton. To those I would respond: how dare you insult Mr. Wolfram.Wolfram's Principle of Computational Equivalence is an idea that easily dwarfs Calculus and the Theory of Evolution in terms of being able to explain the natural world. While I will not debate or reconstrue the details of Wolfram's work in this space - such a task will no doubt take mountain ranges of books and centuries of research - I will instead offer this critique of Wolfram's detractors: your minds are diseased with irrationality. Your myopia will be scorned by history. And your way of thinking will soon die.
Rating:
Summary: A new environmental respecting Science!
Review: Only 100 pages to the end and i wish it never finish.
Entusiasmatic book and so big in sise it give me a tremendous intellectual look!
The basic discovery at the base of this book is that also simple programs casually choosed can produce complex behaviors; never underrate this discovery dont be bored of repetitions, and you'll will learn a new science.
I am more poet than engineer so i am most probably wrong but i still wonder that wind itself has a complex behavior and the sea could be a good way to store informations so how could whe know there is not life there?, intelligence there ? in front of this science discovery.
May be enginers will one day use big sails moved by a computer to communicate with mother earth, and big hollows to give her a voice, may be challenger explorer often find storm at his arrival becouse is considered a danger for wind intelligences,and they cannot wonder one day umans will let them communicate with others wind intelligences in venus or jupiter tanks their travels, may be ... but only 100 pages to the end.
Rating: 
Summary: Revisionist history by an egomaniac
Review: Wolfram has been greatly overrated for years, and here he proves it. "A New Kind of Science" is nothing particularly new, and any scientist or editor will cringe after a short perusal. The pictures are pretty, though. But the egomania begins from the title and continues throughout. Wolfram claims on almost every page that this book will revolutionize science (*every field of science*: see pages 7-16), although the idea expounded (physical/intellectual phenomena are equivalent to cellular automata) has been found in the grubby notebooks of high school students since, well, the dawn of high schools. What really rankles about this book is Wolfram's fashioning of himself as some independent genius, coming up with a wonderful idea all by himself, and the lack of respect he shows to his contemporaries and those who came before. But below are some of the greater faults of the book: 1) The lack of a bibliography. No reasonable scientific book before or after this was published would attempt this. But it does allow Wolfram to give short shrift to those who did work in the field, like J.H. Conway. It's claimed that this would be impossible in a book of this scope. Wrong: see Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming".
2) Lack of rigorous, semi-rigorous, or even guesses at mathematical proofs. Most results are of the form: "I tried this up to a thousand", which wouldn't get you published anywhere else but in a vanity press. He's got a nice coding (every rule has a nice binary coding), but are there any slightly-justified group-theoretical guesses on the rules? (*Why* are there 218/65536 rules that have a particular behavior? What's the significance?) Any guesses based on the recursive nature of the coding? No.
One could say this is because the book was meant for the layman, but laymen can handle proof sketches. I suspect the proofs were simply not attempted. Instead there are many claims on the order of the margin not being wide enough for the proof because the result is too far-reaching, etc.
3) Revisionist history. See timeline on pp. 879-880, for example, indicating the lack of no important work in cellular automata since 1981, when Wolfram started looking at it.
4) The lack of proper editing. Wolfram (and his coworkers) edited this book themselves. This is actually bragged about. But the ponderous prose: ("And indeed the existence of such simple rules is crucial in making it plausible that the general mechanism of instrinsic randomness generations can be widespread in nature." could be "These simple rules seem to imply that randomness is widespread in nature."), the "I did this", et cetera, explain why this is a 1100-page book instead of a 100-page book. Don't get me wrong; occasionally there's something cool here. But not enough to justify buying this book. And not nearly enough to justify the title.
Rating: 
Summary: A SIMPLE FORMULA CAN EXPLAIN LIFE!!!
Review: A simple formula can explain life.
But to explain the formula Wolfram needs a million words.
Sometimes he will even remind us in one chapter what he discussed in the previous chapter anything to add words. This book is heavy in words.
Example a simple beautiful idea explaining complexity
Systems with simple rules can produce behavior that is complex.
The readers believes the hypothesis but is lost or even bored in the explanation. A new kind of science needs a new kind of way to explain it. How about simple sentences without redundancy.
I gave this review 4 stars because I beleve the ideas in this book will benefit all areas of scientific research.
Rating: 
Summary: Its a Conceited ME Book
Review: I was pretty excited while my own copy of "A New Kind of Science" was on its way. The thought of a revolutionary new way of thinking about Science, which would change the way we interact with the universe. Perhaps this could be a book on par with Issac Newton, or other science greats.
It didn't take long though to become very disappointed. Me me me me me, "I discovered this", "I discovered that" but in fact, in my opinion there wasn't anything truly great. It was hard, if not impossible to find any useful or even provokative ideas through the haze of conceited narrative.
I would NOT recommend this book to anyone. Stephen, next time you write a book, try not to do it in front of a mirror.
Rating:
Summary: degenerating brilliance
Review: Unfortunately it is not uncommon for brilliance to degenerate into self-absorbed delusions of grandeur in later life...but it is sad and embarrasing for the rest of us to watch. At least he is protected by his own "belle indifference" to reality. There are still nuggets of interest in the book but it is doubtful they are worth searching out in this tedious tome. There really is no new science here that others aren't already developing with more substance. The alarming thing is how many major publications are giving such rave reviews and comparing him with Newton and Einstein (who also completed their best work when young). What pop slop. Try the more intelligent reviews like Physics Today...and this reviewer is being KIND (so am I).
Rating: 
Summary: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Review: This is a book about Big Ideas. Stephen Wolfram reflects on a range of intellectual fields, and I am an expert in none of them. But I think I have a handle on Wolfram's basic approach, and I also think some simple reasoning can show the strengths and the weaknesses of his theory.
The Good - (1) His explanation of genetic computations as an evolutionary force should absolutely be considered as a complement to Natural Selection. While I am not sure that genetic expression was ever thought of as anything other than the chemical computations of genes, his examples of fundamental computational drivers add a depth that to my knowledge did not exist before. (2) His description of 4 types of automata behavior seems simple and complete. It is a legitimate "first principles" try at abstractly categorizing behavior based on rules. His claimed discoveries that more complex automata rules do not create more complex behavior, and that different rules can create similar behavior, serve to reinforce the reality behind the theory. (3) Wolfram states that if a system is computationally irreducible - that is, there is no mathematical formula that completely describes the system - then there is no way to find the original state of the system by reverse engineering. I don't know if this is original with Wolfram, but it describes a boundary - a limit of knowledge - that needs to be either proved or disproved. I am not confident that automata of limited dimensions conclusively prove this. The Bad - (A) The reasoning leading to Wolfram's dismissal of Natural Selection as an evolutionary force is either flawed or not properly explained. Rules that execute in a complex environment will conflict with other executing rules in that environment, even if it is only a conflict for available resources. This conflict is Natural Selection at a tactical level. Automata, however, live in a world of unlimited resources. This means that the truths of automata, as described (so far) by Wolfram, do not accurately translate to the world as we commonly know it. His results are theoretical, and not necessarily practical. (An interesting question is that mathematics also operates under the "unlimited resource" of infinity. Is that practical?) (B) There is also a reasoning omission at a more fundamental level. If the universe was created in a Big Bang of energy, then everything in this universe must be composed of energy. This means that even ideas are composed of energy. Further, it can be demonstrated that energy obeys basic mathematical laws (or rules), meaning ideas must also obey these laws because they are also composed of energy. This thinking is at odds with Wolfram's startling premise that mathematics (not only mathematical models - equations) are not a part of nature and do not describe the universe. This is in spite of the fact that he describes computations as rules "roughly analogous" to computer machine instructions. Further, he explores these rules by converting them into logical programs run on a logical computer. So he appears to be saying that logical rules are a part of nature and can describe the universe, as long as logic is not converted to its equivalent mathematical forms. Wolfram can't have it both ways. If the rules of computation are logical, then they are also mathematical. (And if rules produce specific repeatable results, how are they different from equations?) There might be a theory that shows some logical ideas exist apart from a dimensionally defined physical universe while still obeying logical rules, but Wolfram has not even hinted that he knows or "suspects" what that theory might be. The Ugly - Despite 350 pages of small print notes, there remain a lot of reports that Wolfram did not give credit to other researchers. At best, that is bad form, and bad form resonates to the authenticity of his motives and therefore his results. If Stephen Wolfram is open to suggestions, he might want to consider fixing this right away. Bottom line, even with the caveats I recommend the book. Whether Wolfram is mostly right or mostly wrong, this is a fun read made bold by provocative ideas.
Rating:
Summary: Terrible.
Review: This is a terrible book. For those thinking of buying it--don't. You can get a good feel for how scatter brained this book is by reading the sample pages. You will note that Wolfram does not give consecutive pages in the sample. Read a few of the sample pages. You can forgive a book for having a few pages with wild speculation and self references--going a bit afield--but every page of the book is like this. I think he had no choice but to not include consecutive pages, as almost all books on Amazon do. Had he included consecutive pages, everyone would have been able to see that there are no coherent arguments made in this book. A good sampling of a book will include a chapter or at least a section of a book so that one can discern the pattern of a books expedition. Here Wolfram only includes a scatter shot of pages and unfortunately they read the same as the consecutive pages in his book do. Don't buy the book thinking there will be any resolution to all the open questions and grand claims in the sample pages. There is just page after page of the same. Wolfram did do some decent work back in the 80's and one can read his articles on his website. If you want a popular treatment of chaos and cellular automata, there are many such books that are much better written. For example, Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick. This is a much better book written by a professional and it would seem that Wolfram perhaps borrowed his title from this book.
Rating:
Summary: I just returned the book.
Review: Wolfram spent the past 20 year ALONE to work on this book, which proves nothing but the values of scientific communication and peer review.
Rating:
Summary: Now with less than 30% notes!!! 70% pure pop-science blech!
Review: I'll admit that I was initially impressed by the size of
this book. Then I was a little disappointed by the table of
contents (less than detailed, more than vague and quite useless)
but somewhat impressed by the index (I estimate between 70 and 115
pages) which had references to everything from Frege to Extra
Terrestrial Intelligence. After following a few of these into
the twin-columed tiny-fonted text near the end of the book I
eventually realized that I was poking around in the notes (which
take up the last 350 pages). This brings the 'tome' down to a
gentle 850 pages of double spaced, large faced type in which the
great Wolfram appears to discover network theory and convince
himself that the aliens might be on their way.
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