Rating: 
Summary: Nothing New
Review: While this book is fairly easy to read and includes lots of pretty pictures, it doesn't offer anything new to people who are familiar with cellular automata and related areas. There are also no implications for science. Wolfram suggests that the universe may be ruled by only a small number of rules but he offers no evidence that this is true, and also gives no suggestions on how to apply any of this to the real world. The book is essentially devoted to showing how complicated-looking designs can be created using simple rules. It would be nice if he could suggest ways on deriving an appropriate set of rules from a given pattern. Or an approximation to the pattern at least. There are plenty of complicated patterns that don't satisfy only a few simple rules, so why should the world necessarily be governed by only a few rules? It was proved some time ago that starting positions in Conway's game of life can be used as a form of computer which means that any question that could be answered by a computer can be translated into a question about what happens to a certain starting position in the game of life. Then there can be no real hope of being able to fully understand the game. Maybe this kind of thing was new when Wolfram started writing but it's fairly common knowledge now and it hasn't influenced science yet. I don't expect it ever will. Overall, this book might interest a layperson in cellular automata but won't add anything to the scientific community. It just doesn't live up to its claim.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful book!!
Review: Do not listen to the person who panned this book. Mr. Wolfram spent many many years studying the theories and writing this book and the conclusions he draws are truly astounding. Have you ever noticed how those who are critical never identify themselves?
Rating: 
Summary: Probably a waste of trees
Review: Wolfram is famous for being able to impress the physicists that he's a great mathematician, and for being able to impress the mathematicians that he's a great physicist. Collectively, he can get himself hired at a top University by playing this sleight-of-hand game. However, he is neither a great computer scientist nor a great physicist. He is more like a good shareware author (SMP, and later, Mathematica). I attended one of his long-winded 65 minute talks at U-Illinois a decade ago. It was so vague and touchy feely that nobody dared to ask a question when he was done. Wolfram was furious with the audience and scolded all 100 of us students and faculty for not asking him any questions. We all felt bad for him because he had embarassed himself so thoroughly in the talk. One thing that wolfram does well is that he speaks very quickly and very accurately. For an Englishman, he talks almost as fast as a native from India. This tends to impress people but then again, an auctioneer can talk far more quickly than Wolfram, and I am not aware of any famous auctioneer-physicists or auctioneer-computer scientists. Overall, I would suggest that readers look very carefully at the sample pages before buying this book - Because Wolfram is not successful in my field (computer science), and I suspect that the same holds true in Physics.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating but not 'revolutionary'
Review: I have studied Wolfram classifications of cellular automata, and his important stat mech analysis of their behavior as it relates to the work that I do. I certainly respect this major contribution to complex systems. Moreover, I believe that the idea that simple rule-systems can result in complex behavior is going to be a recurrant one in the future of science, but that idea has been around for a long time. CAs were invented von Neumann (perhaps upon the suggestion by Stanislaw Ulam) in the 50s. Now von Neumann was a absolute visionary, and in my opinion, the founding father of computation. Wolfram and others in the field in the 80s built on von Neumann's work. What Wolfram did was to take the CA model and demonstrate how it could be analyzed and classified in a new way, and he applied very sophisticated analytical tools to the model. But he wasn't the only one busily working on this. What about CG Langton? And John Conway? And all of the people in academia in complex systems and/or artificial life fields busily working and publishing sophisticated papers over the last 10 years while Wolfram has been in hiding? And then there's the strange nature of the author. A brilliant young particle physicist, a new faculty member at Caltech, the youngest MacArthur Fellow ever, with a bright future ahead of him, and then a few years down the road next thing we know he's "in hiding" writing a book of "momumental importance" that will change "everything." It kind of smells like Linus Pauling or James Watson or any of the numerous examples of brilliant minds gone astray in their later years. There is no denying that the book is thought-provoking, but the popular press has made Wolfram to sound like someone who came out of outer space with this idea, and that the idea will hit the science world like a bomb and change everything. To the contrary, these are complex ideas that have been studied by many skilled researchers over the years, and will continue to be studied. And the ideas are unlikely to have an impact on ENGINEERING practical, useful technologies for a very long time, if ever. Lastly, I'm sure I'm expressing the collective feeling of the science world with the hope that Wolfram develops on ongoing, collaborative research effort in this field that he has affected so greatly. That way, his work would be added constructively to the ongoing effort in academia today, and it wouldn't be held aside, making him look distinctly crack-pot-esque.
Rating:
Summary: A big disappointment.
Review: I have been expecting this book for quite sometime. I was truly impressed by the author's biography and his claims on his web page saying that this book brings "a whole new way of looking at the operation of our universe." I have read the first 400 pages of this book. Conceptually, there is nothing novel in it. Even before this book, the striking similarities between nature and dynamical systems were well known (See James Gleick's Chaos). Wolfram's analysis of dynamical systems is all visual, not analytical; at the same time it is very boring to read. I think that the book is more about nice graphical representation of time evolution of some dynamical systems, than a new "big theory." Wolfram thinks that he should get credit about many things which he call "grand discoveries." But I think that his points are either trivial or wrong. As I said, I've just read the first 400 pages, but I don't know if I'll continue reading; this book is indeed very boring. In my opinion, don't waste your money and time with this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Not so fast¿.
Review: Based on a further exploration of cellular automata (CA) and the notion that modesty is a bad habit Wolfram offers us a tome devoted to "a new kind of science". In this book he revisits some CA classics and attempts to give them the same appeal that Mandelbrot's work on fractals received. I admit Stephen Wolfram is orders of magnitude smarter than me; in addition he has a proven track record in this field. Yet, remember the Fleischmann and Pons' cold fusion debacle: in science status does not necessarily translate into truth. This well written and well illustrated book is foremost a CA expedition. In cell biology, the field of my own expertise, I have witnessed that CAs can be successfully employed for modeling a variety of processes. The most significant part of this book aims an attack at the second law of thermodynamics. Based on a CA model Wolfram shows that the 2nd laws main assumption, the attainment of the highest number of degrees of freedom, entropy, in a system might be false. The implications of proving this finding are obviously tremendous. Yet, in despite of all the clarity of Wolfram's argument he does little in proving that the application of a CA model would be justified. Lacking such a link, which would justify the term "Science", we witness yet another attack of the circular logic, that some modelers seem to excel in. I admit that it is tantalizing to conjure the implications of Wolfram's models, but as yet see no reason to throw old science over board. A new kind of science is an intriguing book. Based on the contents of this tome I think any preliminary comparison with Euclid's Elements or Newton's Principia is completely out of order. While I greatly enjoyed the clear and insightful discussion of CAs, the lack of true proof that this book will launch a new kind of science limits my rating. For those in need of a very accessible dose of true genius, I advise Feynman's QED.
Rating:
Summary: trivialities on steroids.
Review: This book seems like a Martin Gardner "Mathematical Games" column from an old Scientific American magazine, gone totally bonkers. A new kind of Science is Conway's game of "Life" turn into a nightmare. The use of "I" and "me" and "myself" (Only Irene is missing here) is so incredible pervasive as to make this book illegible. Perseverant readers will find out that "A New Kind of Science" is a collection of trivialities on steroids.
Rating:
Summary: A Good Experimental Exercise
Review: Go to the bookstore, and read it for a while. Look at the sections which are most related to your field. Mr. Wolfram relies on computational methods much more than a scientist should do. Computers show us the plausible directions; however, they are sadly limited in many aspects, in terms of science. Isn't this a promotion for his Mathematica?
Rating:
Summary: He's got it all wrong
Review: This is a self-published book by a self-described genius who claims to have revolutionized all of science. It's about what you'd expect for such a publication. Wolfram is not a crank in the usual sense (he doesn't claim that Einstein was wrong, for example) because he had a solid physics training before becoming a software entrepreneur, so he knows better than that. Rather, he simply asserts that he has superseded all earlier science. A modest claim. What has he done? Cellular automata were invented by von Neumann (an authentic genius, if anyone ever was) about 50 years ago as a tool for thinking about the mathematics of computation. Now that computers are on every desk, anyone can carry out elaborate and rapid computations of cellular automata. The results are lots of pretty pictures, which somewhat resemble snowflakes, river deltas, and other natural phenomena. Unfortunately, they do not help us understand the natural phenomena. The resemblance isn't exact and the cellular automata have no predictive power. In one way many of the pictures made by cellular automata are close to the natural phenomena: they are scale-invariant. This idea was fully developed by Kolmogorov in the 1940's and M. Fisher in the late 1960's. It received a great deal of publicity beginning in the 1980's, mostly under the label ``fractals'', which are related to the pictures made by cellular automata. Wolfram doesn't have much new to add. The physicist will ask if Wolfram's work helps him to understand semiconductors and elementary particles, the astronomer quasars and black holes, the chemist chemical reactions and bonds and the biologist DNA and proteins. In each case (and in any other scientific questions you might name) the answer is no. Where did Wolfram go wrong? He had so much fun playing with cellular automata on the computer he forgot that they have nothing to do with the natural world, which is what science is about. Cut off from the give-and-take and free criticism of the academic world, surrounded only by acolytes at his software company (don't tell the boss he is wrong, especially when the boss thinks he is the greatest genius who ever lived), his fantasies of greatness grew on themselves. It's a pity, because he really is very clever fellow and could have done good work if only he hadn't isolated himself. But he is deceiving the reader when he claims that this work will revolutionize how we think about science. It doesn't contribute at all. At least Bill Gates doesn't claim to be the world's greatest genius, or greatest programmer. In contrast, that is refreshing.
Rating:
Summary: disappointing
Review: [The following is a reprint of an email message I sent to a friend. Disclosure: The checkerboard and weather analogies are mine, not the author's.] After reading 250 pages now, it seems that he has presented only a single concept. One might phrase this concept as follows: It is possible to specify the evolution of a mathematical system (for instance, an ever-expanding black/white painting of squares on a boundless grid) by a small set of rules (for instance, paint a square the majority color of its three neighboring squares on the previous row); for some such set of "simple" rules, the evolution of the system yields a seemingly random pattern, rather than an ordered one (such as a checkerboard pattern). I was unfamiliar with this result. It was counterintuitive to me and is quite interesting. But the author presents the result early on in the book, and there is little additional content in the next 200 pages. I think his upcoming hypothesis is that many (all?) systems in the physical world actually work like the coloring of the grid described above. For instance, the behavior ("color") of a molecule of air ("square") may be governed by the behavior of the molecules around it ("neighbor squares"), and yet a possibly simple set of rules describing individual molecules of air could yield complex weather patterns. It is all conceivable, perhaps. But in flipping through the upcoming chapters, I fear that he is basing his conclusions on mere intuition -- or perhaps at this level one might call it religion -- rather than on solid experimental or scientific ground. It is definitely an odd book.
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