A New Kind of Science

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Summary: Patterns Produced by Universal Turning Machines
Review: Open page 262 of A Knew Kind of Science. Observe the pattern produced by running rule 22 on a universal turing machine(your home pc). Buy Ian Stewart's book What Shape is A Snowflake, open it to page 164 and observe the pattern on a the volute shell. Look the same?

For nature to produce a pattern so similar to that of pattern 22 running on a universal turing machine must mean that nature is a universal turing machine capable of running pattern 22.

This is what i take to the main point of A Knew Kind of Science. I think Wolfram is a kean obeserver of a nature and I solute him for his publishing his book chronicling his fifteen years of universal turing machine experiments.

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Summary: This guy is responsible for Mathematica?
Review: All that needs to be said has been said in the prior 190 some reviews. The basics are this. Annoyingly self-aggrandizing and poorly written. OK, so the guy isn't a great writer, and he's impressed with himself. That describes a great many geniuses. If I spent 10 years writing 1000 pages, I'd try to convince myself it was amazing stuff too.

There is a LOT of food for thought although not really much technically satisfying robustness. It is definitely worth paging through. I would suggest skimming over the pictures (pausing on those few that look really neat) and reading his concluding sections. What one will not find is much, if any, "new science that will transform the way the world thinks." I don't need to reiterate all thats already been said but one thing I want to say is that this work is definitely not all his original idea. By never referencing (maybe a little in the notes) the other bright minds that have contributed to these ideas, he's does them a disservice while making himself look bad. One thing unanswered (and the reason why I ultimately don't think this is "earth-shaking") is: what are the physical, psychological, mathematical etc. reasons that such rules would develop and how would they be created naturally in the system's environment? I am under the conviction that, at least in this presentation, the pictures are merely a visually interesting mathematical amusement. Worth paging through, probably not worth owning unless complexity systems are of great interest to you and you can get past Wolfram's God complex. Mathematica is amazing, this book isn't.

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Summary: THE PROFOUND IDIOCY OF THE OTHER REVIEWERS
Review: While studying physics at Yale, I became fascinated by the implications of chaos theory and complexity theory. Now having read "A New Kind of Science," I feel confident in saying that whosoever doubts the stunning truth that is the Principle of Computational Equivalence is clearly thinking irrationally. You're just not smart enough, people! While Wolfram's hubris and erraticly digressive style may have fooled your pitiful minds into not understanding his point, THIS MEME WILL FLOURISH in one guise or another. And your grossly myopic way of thinking, Professor Whoever from Berkeley, will soon seem as quaint and as distant from truth as Creationism.

So put that in your pipe and smoke it. (A tendril will come out the other end that is as computationally sophisticated as you.)

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Summary: A Different Perspective
Review: In reading some of the reviews below, I've noticed that many criticisms focus on the inapplicability of cellular automata to particular problems in science, or the fact that computational equivalence (through emulation) is already fairly well understood.

I would suggest that we instead direct our attention toward the crucial concept of the book: due to the nature of complexity, it is often futile to attempt to model systems using traditional mathematical abstractions. The reason for this becomes clearer if we think of every system as in a sense performing computation. If a system is computing and we attempt to model this computation with another system of lesser complexity (for example, a set of equations), we can expect our model to be imperfect. The degree to which it is imperfect depends on the nature of the original system. Wolfram presents several types of systems (including cellular automata) that are very difficult to model with systems of lesser complexity. He also argues that many systems in nature may share this property.

If we accept this perspective, Wolfram's ideas become, if not revolutionary, at least useful to keep in mind when trying to understand how systems work.

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Summary: Microcosmic Mathematimusings
Review: Here's a brief review as counterpoint to a looong book.

Q: Why was this huge, lushly illustrated book, by a known scientist, published without reviewers' comments on the jacket?
A: Because the author himself published it.

This narcissistically brilliant tome is sweeping in scope yet searingly simplistic. Vibrantly visionary yet meagerly miopic. Fixedly fascinated with form over function. Form, form, form. The author claims that EVERY thing and activity in the universe, worm wiggles to Wall Street wobbles, exists solely as automated replication of bits from simple initial programs, just as snowflakes' infinite variety originates from simple water-crystal aggregations. Snowflakes or symphonies, simians or Sikorski -- same stuff.

The book DOES give solid "food for thought" -- analogous to "food for body" limited solely to brown rice -- a similarly miopic condensation of macrobiotic logic. Still, brown rice is a good food. And this book is a good thought provoker and idea generator.

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Summary: Not new and not science
Review: With extreme hubris, Wolfram has titled his new book on cellular automata "A New Kind of Science".

But it's not new.

And it's not science.

The main text of the book gives the strong impression that everything pictured and described in the book is Wolfram's own invention. Moreover, he often implies that various areas of science have been much more limited in their scope than they actually are.

Consequently, it is vital to read the notes at the back of the book in combination with the main text, in order to restore a little of the balance. The notes are much better at giving proper credit to the vast reams of work that Wolfram is building on. (see http://freespace.virgin.net/david.drysdale/wolfram/references.html)

Also, there is very little in the book that satisfies the usual criteria for science, which is to be verifiable/falsifiable. To be fair, Wolfram does explain some reasons *why* his approach can only produce descriptive science not predictive science, but it still hugely fails to live up to his promise of re-writing the rules of science.

Overall, if the book were presented as just a survey of various areas of modern science from the perspective of computation, then I would give it 4 stars. But it's not--the hype (both in and around the book) claims that is so much more, and it flat isn't.

(full review at
http://freespace.virgin.net/david.drysdale/wolfram/review.html, together with notes on the text at

http://freespace.virgin.net/david.drysdale/wolfram/notes.html)

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Summary: Worth reading
Review: I expected great things from the creator of the most powerful and expressive programming language ever--Mathematica. And A New Kind of Science does deliver great things, but my review is mixed.

I found the book wonder-full, but a little unconvincing. Even with the Principle of Computational Equivalence (PCE), my human brain can't quite accept yet its computational equivalence to both a turbulent fluid and the whole universe. My brain figures it outranks the former (though some friends would disagree), and isn't near the latter.

Many new concepts, including PCE and ideas about human perception and analysis are truly wonderful and worth thinking about, and I'm looking forward to new developments.

Stephen Wolfram is to be admired for the amazing breadth of his undertaking and understanding. In a time where narrower and narrower expertise is expected, he does a world class job of exploring, understanding, and explaining (made more evident in the notes) almost every area of modern human thought.

Read it!

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Summary: Save some trees, and your money
Review: As a physicist who works in the field of complex systems and computational physics I was really looking forward Wolfram's new book. I was extremely dissapointed when I ordered the book. There really was not much "science" in the text, there are little to no references to other works ( I guess Dr. Wolfram must have just figured out everything himself?). This is NOT a technical book, and it will not promote a better understanding of complex systems. Save some paper and your money, this is not a good book. I have sent my copy back, I already have a solid doorstop.

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Summary: Wolfram's "New" Science Simply Doesn't Work
Review: As everyone who can read English and has been awake for the past six months knows, Stephen Wolfram has written how certain cellular automata have the "universal" property of being able to perform any calculation that can be performed on a computer or anything else. Wolfram generates thousands of lovely pictures that, he claims, are similar to those observed in many physical and biological systems. All these pictures are generated by simple rules and sometimes simple initial conditions. Yet, some show surprisingly complex and seemingly random behaviour.

So far so good. Wolfram's next contention is that the complexity found in what he calls Class 4 cellular automata cannot be exceeded by any physical, biological or computational process. Put more boldly, every physical, biological, psychological, financial, meteorolical and, no doubt, astrological feature of the universe that exhibits complexity is generated by some sort of cellular automaton with appropriate initial conditions.

Such a statement cannot, of course, be proved in any acceptable way. To compensate, Wolfram gives us many examples of phenomena whose random behaviour resembles those of cellular automata. He is most convincing with his pictures of real seashells and arguments about turbulence in fluids (I especially liked his wafting smoke in the air anology.) He is less persuasive when he argues that evolution has nothing to do with maximizing anything and everything to do with generated patterns, some of which survive. When he talks about the analogy between Class 4 cellular automata and human cognition, he is downright silly.

Yet this is all irrelevant. Wolfram is scathing in the inability of mathematics to solve anything but the simplest physical problems. Thus Newton could tell us how to calculate the orbit of a planet around a star but neither he nor any of his successors could come up with a reasonable mathematical model for turbulence. And no one has even attempted a mathematical model of evolution.

But describing the disease is easier than prescribing a cure. Suppose that Wolfram is correct and that every meaningful physical and biological process is generated by an ongoing cellular automoton--or something equivalent. Then we could understand how we got where we are and predict where we will go. All we need is to discover the underlying rules and initial conditions for each system we wish to model. But therein lies the rub.

Wolfram argues persuasively that the systems generated by Class 4 cellular automata are irreducible. This means that there is no shorthand method for calculating future behaviour. The only thing we can do is go through the iteration millions, billions, gazillions of times and observe the outcomes at each step. Since the behaviour is random, knowing where you are at any step doesn't help you to predict where you will be at a future step.

The inverse problem is far more intractable. It is practically impossible to determine the underlying rules and initial conditions of a cellular automoton by looking at the deterministic pattern that it generated--especially if the pattern is complex and random (the only case of interest). But that's the whole point. Even if we knew with certainty that some complex process was generated by a cellular automoton with simple rules, it would still be impossible to describe its past behaviour or predict its future because we could never find the rule and starting conditions.

So, at its most profound level, even if Wolfram's new science is correct, it fails at doing two of the most fundamental things that science is supposed to do: telling us how we got where we are and making predictions about future behaviour.

In the final analysis, Wolfram's book is brilliant and well worth reading. But its new ideas may prove to be as useful as those in astrology.

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Summary: Unoriginal and dreadfully written
Review: I got suckered into buying this book by the Wolfram name. I should have spent more time skimming it in the store as there is nothing trully groundbreaking in it. Complexity theory has been around for sometime and has been applied to numerous scientific and non-scientific areas. I bought it believing that it would be a good, thorough survey of complexity.

I must disclose that I have not and will not read the whole book. To say the book is poorly written is an understatement. The 1100+ pages of text and notes meander through a Wolfram stream of conscienciousness, heavily laced with self-aggrandizing statements on the originality of the material. The first ten pages read like a B-movie mad-scientist proclaiming his brilliance. Dr. Frankenstein was more humble.

There are so many declarations of originality that the book feels more like a snake oil tent show rather than an academic proposal for a fundamental paradigm shift. Watch the words "discoveries never before made public," which read like a late night informercial and really mean: material not peer reviewed or published in reputable, scholarly journals. Wolfram claims he has spent the last 10 years as a "recluse," which apparently meant isolation not only from friends and family but from the academic world at large, which has somehow managed to progress without him.

I couldn't believe this book got published, until I saw that it is published by Wolfram Media. Besides being owned by the author, Wolfram Media has only published instruction books for Mathematica. I doubt another publishing house would touch this book.

Other negative reviews have cited the "pretty pictures," as a positive aspect of the book. While there are plenty of picutres, like the text, they are neither original nor partticularly pretty.