Rating: 
Summary: A Publishing Travesty
Review: How can such a brilliant mind transform a book into such an empty experience? Because as another reviewer rightly points out, clearly the author is locked into his own mental closet with a leash and dog dish. The logging roads must have been jammed like the Ventura Freeway as lumberjacks hastened to clear-cut old sequoia growth - one tree per book. The essence of the reading experience is to make it easy on the reader, but yet we have spaced phrases such as "routinely manage to retrieve" on page 627 because the author refuses to resort to <the horror> hyphenation. Don't worry, just two paragraphs later, he mentions Mathematica six times "And the success of Mathematica provides considerable evidence for the power..." Next time, hire a freakin' typesetter and editor because this is a new kind of book - an inexhaustible resource when you run out of Charmin.
Rating:
Summary: Computation as Ironic Science (or rather non-Science)?
Review: Those who hope to find the contents of this book to be the "mother of all science" should read another book before even reading the first page of Wolfram's book: "The End of Science - Facing the Limits of Knowledge in Twilight of the Scientific Age" by John Horgan (who writes for Scientific American). The parts about "ironic science", theories of everything and "chaoplexity" are highly applicable to Wolfram's book.Mathematics, whether as we usually see it or in the form of computation, is a valuable tool to science. But by itself, it isn't science. Science is based in experiments and observations of our physical reality. In order to be meaningful, scientific theories need to be testable and tested against reality. "If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong" to quote Feynman... :-) Unfortunately, any mathematical description can look like real science to the casual observer. (Just like I wouldn't be able to tell a poem in Chinese from goobleydook in Chinese.) This has even lead some people who know some science, but more math or computation than they know science, to believe that they can reverse the logic of science and still do science... The result is so-called "ironic science" which is isn't science at all, but something more akin to a work of literature or fiction. It can be enjoyable, thought-provoking and so on. But not science. More generally speaking, Wolfram isn't at all unique in his way of using math and computation (unfortunately). I've seen people claiming that they "model" societal phenomena when all they do is mathematical pattern-matching in reverse, i.e. start with a reasonable resulting pattern and then grab in the mathematical toolbox for a suitable equation without bothering about the "mechanics" of the phenomenon. By the way, superstring theory is attacked in the book Horgan and also classified as ironic science. By all means, read this book (after you've read Horgan), but don't believe this is a new kind of science, because it isn't science at all!
Rating: 
Summary: Where's the "readable" part?
Review: I don't pretend to be anything except interested in observation. I knew the author's name/reputation,
and on the strength of that and the editorial which indicated non-technical folks could enjoy a large portion of this
material, I bought it. O Annotator, where art Thou. Good thing the Summer's just started. This will be slow going.
Rating: 
Summary: okay
Review: My initial view of this book was positive, but some reflection and more intensive research led me to change my mind. Really, Wolfram has nothing of overriding interest to say and belabours it greatly. The fields he considers stagnant or stagnating (nonlinear dynamics, complex systems, various algorithmically-oriented fields, neural networks etc. etc.), to my knowledge, are rather not so and are aware in varying degrees and respects of the points Wolfram has to make. As I see it, the two main criticisms of existing scientific theory Wolfram offers that stand out are against the power of natural selection and the universality/inevitability of the 2nd law. While they are interesting, they have been made before and, in my opinion, more coherently and perspicaciously. All in all, there's really not much here.
Rating:
Summary: Not new, not much science
Review: What a disappointment! After all the hype, to find out that the book is largely just a summary and printout of hundreds of cellular automata experiments that any of us could run (and many doubtless have) with programs that are free on the web! Wolfram adds insult to injury in that a tremendous number of his 'insights' are of the 'it seems to me' or 'I believe this is because' kind. I expect more from someone claiming a mathematical background and ground-breaking insights. Mathematics and science should be about proof and demonstration. Book should be titled 'my hobbies and guesses'. I sent mine back--something I virtually NEVER do.
Rating:
Summary: The most significant book in the category of
Review: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
Sure, by a much inferior writer but no less amusing and entertaining. What Mr. Wolfram was smoking when he wrote all these down is anyone's guess. But it's obvious that he was high, really high, way high when he wrote this book.
My impression is that he paid a few people from major papers to interview him and ask whether he think he is Newton and things like that. He must also fund a few university professors to say that this book change their view about scientific research. Then there is a bunch of clueless people gathering around him and call him Newton, Darwin. Ironically that proved the laws described in the book. Some simple condition (Mr. Wolfram spent a few bucks) produce a complex phenomena (This irrelevant, boring and ugly book becomes bestseller and Wolfram becomes the greatest scientist).
Also a thing I heard so much lately. Mr. Wolfram is the author of Mathematica. Again, he takes the work of hundreds of people without giving them any credit. Disgusting.
Why Mr. Wolfram can get away with all this. Read the first chapter of Philip Greenspun. If you have money you can invent truth. Besides, the innocent public like simple truth. Mr. So and so is THE GREASTEST scientist. He found the fundamental truth about EVERYTHING.
Rating:
Summary: A new kind of scince or a kind of nuisance?
Review: I really enjoyed some of the reviews posted here. One can tell that they are given a lot of thought to. I will try to make mine follow the same kind of guideline. In the first place let's let Wolfram get away by not defining some of the most definition-requiring terms, such as complexity. I'll explain why in a minute. I couldn't let myself write this only after I also read most of his published papers, in a book that came out in 1986 (Theory and Applications of Cellular Automata). There he defines most of the terms that he uses in ANKOS. I said we should let him get away because perhaps he wanted to publish a science book for the average reader with no background of cellular automata. (something that a smart fellow should not have done. When you "claim" you have a new kind of science, you prove it first. Then when it's established you try to explain it to the laymen, and not the other way around.) Secondly, I have to repeat myself that one of the reviews that I read here absolutely moved me. Where it says: because Wolfram doesn't face the scientific society he recieves no feedback, and in spite of the fact that he might be very smart, what he does is not science, let alone a new kind. It amazed me for several reasons. Feynman, in a letter addressed to Wolfram, recommends: "You say you want to create your own environment- but you will not be doing that: you will create (perhaps!) an environment that you might like to work in- but you will not be working in(underlined) this environment- you will be administrating it- and the administration environment is not what you seek, is it? you won't enjoy administrating people because you won't succeed in it."
I have almost no doubt Feynman meant success in a scientific way. Otherwise Wolftram Research is a success. But as a scientific environment, it surely deserves little credit. Incidentally the full letter is also available on Wolfram's personal website, if anyone is interested to read. But Feynman, or no Feynman, definition of science is more or less agreed upon, and it certainly will not deviate from this definition so much as to call cellular automata a new kind of science.
And certainly Wolfram is not, as he claims the mastermind of a lot of inventions stated in his book. This I think has been brought up by a lot of good reviews before.
Although I give one star to this book, If you can get it, there are some interesting points in it. I wouldn't call it a waste of trees, like one of the reviewers did, and it is certainly not underpriced! Maybe the title is bogus, surely it's not a new kind of science, but for what it is, there are some entertaining pictures in it.
Rating: 
Summary: Maybe could be 500 pages instead of 1000
Review: In summary, I like the concept... the idea that (dare I repeat it AGAIN) "simple rules can create complex solutions" is something he does a good job of walking the reader through. He presents many exciting ideas. But I might recommend that people wait for the hype to die down and for real critical analysis of the book to take place before adding it to your bookshelf. Or just be ready to endure bad writing to get at the meat of the matter. More details follow: As others have said in their review, I haven't completely digested everything the author has tried to propose. The idea that science can be looked at differently is great. He proposes a solution to get "out of the box" that seems plausible. However, his writing style is lacking. I realize he's not trying to pass a literature class, but it was annoying enough to mention. My guess is that he (and his ego) fired all of the editors who were remotely critical of him and, as such, the book is laborious to read. It is extremely repetitive (ad-nauseam). For fast readers, this can be very annoying. Entire lines of thought - consisting of paragraphs of text - are repeated. In addition, captions for the pictures are re-iterated entirely in the main text. One last comment: the 500+ pages of addendum chapters contain a lot of Mathematica-related text. So, if you don't have a copy or want to shell out [the money], it probably won't mean much to you.
Rating:
Summary: Tripe!
Review: Though I haven't read this book, I AM a registered owner of a car and I played baritone in the middle school band. I have added up all of Wolfram's equations on my TI calculator, and they're all false! All I get is "EEEEEEEEEEEEEE". Furthermore, I am whole disappointed....as a person who understands nothing I expected this book to light my fire...but it appears to be flame retardent! Thank you for allowing me to waste your time...much like the rest of these reviews. I didn't know we has so many theoretical physics experts in the haus!
Rating: 
Summary: Best 1-D CA reference in years!!!
Review: I think it's absolutely wonderful that Steven Wolfram selflessly dedicated 10 years of his life to what must have been the incredibly mind-numbing task of creating this tome of a 1-D cellular automata reference! This is the stuff that real philosophy and science is made of. Why, I wouldn't be surprised if in 50 years this book becomes as popular and commonplace as Webster's Unabridged!
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