A New Kind of Science

Rating:
Summary: Does it do what it says on the box?
Review: Does the book represent what it's titled? Does it really describe a new kind of science? Well, it certainly presents a new way of thinking about science, rather like Gleick's book on chaos opened a lot of peoples eyes and minds. If you like Gleicks book, you will like this one. Its going to take some reading, so be ready to invest plenty of time. Its also a non-linear read, you will need to keep flipping to the expansive notes section - almost a book in its own right - to get the best of it. If you're like me, you will also be coding with the other hand while reading it. Expect it to get well thumbed.
For some reason, I was also expecting color images - many of the images are beautiful, but only in a gray scale way, which I think is a pity. For the price, a couple of color plates would have been good.

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps the most important book in this millennium
Review: Imagine being present when Darwin first presented the theory of evolution. Or Newton first described calculus. Or when Einstein first theorized relativity.

Wonder no more. With this book physics will be turned on its head. Its improbable, yet plausible assertion: that the universe is effectively one giant organic calculator, with an incredibly simple (although yet to be defined) set of instructions.

Ever see that computer "Game of Life"? The one where a cell will live or die based on the number of its living neighbors? A simple pattern can after only a few generations develop into a complex, beautiful, seeming unpredictable series of patterns. But it is NOT unpredictable. Rather it is the three simple rules to the game that define it.

Wolfram (whom your children will learn of as we know Galileo or Hawking) calls such a pattern a "cellular automata". Get familiar with that term. Surprisingly even very simple rules can generate complex and interesting patterns. They can potentially be applied to everything from how leopard spots are formed, to weather patterns to evolution to predicting the NASDAQ index. (To his credit, Wolfram doesn't make such claims directly, but the long-term potential is obvious.)

Perhaps as few as 4 rules, and an unimaginable number of generations of their application, define the universe itself.

Wolfram is no quack. He was, at 21, the youngest person to ever recieve a MacArthur genius award. His software program, Mathematica, allows even children to work the most complex mathematical computations and is used by all the corporations in the Fortune 500. The earnings from that product made Wolfram a multi-millionaire and allowed him to take the ten years he needed to put together the "ten million keystrokes" required to explain his ideas.

A little dense at times, but not overwhelming (except in concept), this book can be read by both the scientific and lay community. In fact, those with an open mind may find it easier not to have to carry the intellectual baggage.

Paradoxically, science, while seemingly getting more complicated over the centuries, has provided simpler and simpler answers to real life. The Greeks could explain the orbit of the planets around the Earth only by adding in complex epicycles. Copernicus put the Sun at the center of the solar system and suddenly things made a lot more sense. Einstein said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. With "A New Kind of Science", Wolfram attempts to prove just that.

This could be the most important book of this millennium, affecting our concept of biology, economics, history, man and the universe. Or perhaps not. Only time will tell.

Rating:
Summary: Simply. Amazing.
Review: To grasp the impact of the proposals and ideas presented in this work will be hard for many - but the way it is written makes the IDEAS accessible to most. The world as we know it may seem infinitely complex, but Wolfram explains, and rightly so, that understanding the laws and methods in the madness are simpler than we realize, or may want to accept.

Wonderful output from a man who has spent most of his life chasing what many mainstream scientists regard as mathematical mumbo-jumbo. If the Universe can utilize form and function in the most efficient manners possible based on the physical laws that exist (not that we necessarily understand), who are we to preach otherwise and complicate matter? This work explains that we don't need excess, just the ability to connect the dots between what we know and what truly IS. His approach seems to be: Take all of the nouns in the Universe, put them in a blender, and the product is nothing more than a basic common formula.

Superb examples of visual models. This book will have an amazing impact on our views of the world - mark this one for reading!

Rating:
Summary: Left speechless...
Review: This book is incredible. It tries to redefine mathematics and science itself, using patterns generated by rules and a computer program. This procedure is deeemed a superior method of finding the meaning of something that using a standard equation.

The author is famous for his software and after 20 years or so he has come up with a revolution in mathematics. This book will redefine how you can understand science.

The patterns found may resemble anything from magnetic fields to snowflakes to atomic patterns. It is worth reading this book just to understand more about math and science themselves.

Rating:
Summary: An author who thinks he is the BEST
Review: This book is barely better than a master thesis. It is not revolutionary (despite the fact that the author insists it is original) nor brilliant. It is kind of a extensive research, like a research in a phone book.

Rating:
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.

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: An insider's perspective
Review: Having spent much of the last three years thinking about the contents of this book and doing research in the program it establishes, I feel that it is finally time to set the record straight about what this book is and what it means.

First, what it does not say. It does not say the universe is a cellular automaton. It does not say we need to throw away existing science. It does not say that every other scientist is the world is an idiot. It does not claim every single minute idea contained within it is new, original, or revolutionary.

What it does say, however, is nevertheless as revolutionary as it is inevitable.
The fundamental basis for this book, and the science that it tries to build, is the idea that experimental methods are the only way to discover and understand the computational mechanisms that exist in our universe, and indeed to understand the nature of computation itself. Furthermore, it establishes a set of theoretically grounded principles about how these experiments should be conducted, and how their results connect to the rest of science.

Despite deeply confused claims to the contrary in some other reviews, this core idea is new. This is fairly easily verified -- just flip to Chapter 3 and ask, how many other scientists search through billions of register machines to discover interesting, complex behavior? Who else enumerates the 4096 s2k2 Turing machines and catalogues the computations they perform? This new kind of science is all about enumerating the *very simplest* computational systems and analyzing their behavior without biases towards any existing scientific tradition. This kind of research is simply not done in computer science, mathematics, physics, or the vague field of complexity theory.

Within the first 5 chapters, Wolfram establishes beyond a shadow of a doubt that complex behavior is ubiquitous in even the simplest of computational systems. Clearly, these systems do interesting things, and from a purely intellectual perspective deserve to be a pure field of study, much like pure mathematics. But so what? The rest of the book is dedicated to answering that question.

The fact that complexity is so easy to systematically generate suggests a radical approach to science in general. Traditionally, science looks for interesting things in the natural world, and then develops theories to explain certain aspects of their behavior. What Wolfram effectively is suggesting is that by exploring the computational universe, we can start by enumerating and understanding the theories themselves, and then going to the natural world and find places where they apply. At first this sounds crazy and counterintuitive, and from our traditional intuition we "know" that it cannot possibly work. But this book is all about challenging the traditional intuition using actual facts and ultimately fairly simple although abstract arguments.

Much of the criticism of the book - even by supposedly reputable scientists - is so laughably superficial that it barely warrants a response. But I will give one anyway. Critics complain that Wolfram does not give mathematical definitions of complexity, yet one of Wolfram's *main points* is that such definitions are impossible or at best useless. Critics complain that others - Fredkin and Zuse - first had the idea of the universe as a cellular automaton, yet Wolfram explicitly states that he does *not* think that the universe is a cellular automaton. Critics complain that computational methods are already commonplace, but ignore Wolfram's point that they should be leveraged in accordance to the computational realities of the universe. Critics complain that the book is unreadable, yet Wolfram over and over again captures in a single elegant picture what takes several pages of overcomplicated jargon in technical papers. Critics complain that Wolfram's ideas are too vague to be applicable, yet almost every other page contains an experiment that displays his methodology in action. Critics in the same breath say that the book gives no evidence for its claims while at the same time saying it is too big and sprawling. Critics complain that Wolfram has no respect for the ideas of others, yet they do not have enough respect for Wolfram's ideas to judge them on their merits, rather than the style in which they are presented. Critics say that everyone already knows about the power of simple programs. Oh really? Then why is science continuing to be done in ignorance of their consequences? Why is there already no field of empirically, systematically studying very simple computational systems? Because they are too boring? Not likely.

The book does have flaws. First, it doesn't make clear enough the distinction between studying simple programs for their own sake, and using simple programs in applications to the natural world. I also don't think the book makes enough of an effort to show that a science of simple programs is possible - for instance by developing detailed theories of some particular systems. The criticism of existing science is at times difficult to understand - in some instances Wolfram assails it for being computationally reductionist, and in others places he uses more practical issues such as the difficulty of numerical analysis. There is an absolutely ridiculous amount of information in the book, particularly in the notes -- I feel some of it is tangential, and it would have been better to study fewer topics in greater depth. While it didn't bother me, for the sake of others it may have been wise to tone down the use of the first person.

Looking at the trajectory of science, it is hard to imagine that the ideas and methods in this book will not grow to be commonplace. On some level, I feel that Wolfram's focus on experiment, exhaustiveness, abstraction, and simplicity just makes sense. The computational universe is like an ultimately idealized analog of the natural one - just as rich in its behavior, but far more amenable to systematic methods. Now that this resource has been identified, we should leverage its power.

Rating:
Summary: A hollow book, a big ego, and a missing editor
Review: Wolfram may be good at writing software (he produced Mathematica, after all), but can he write a book? No.

There are three big problems with this book (1) He pretends to present new, big ideas, but instead just re-hashes old concepts; (2) He has a huge ego and refuses to acknowledge others who have walked before him; and (3) the book is virtually impossible to read.

Wolfram's ego killed any chance this book had of being good. Clearly, he refused to let any independent editor help him, or else the book would have been understandable. As published, the book is impossible to read. It is never clear what the author is driving at. The book contains no definitions, no postulates, no theorems, no clearly stated conclusions. What is he driving at? What is the big "new" science? If he cannot define his new science in a few sentences in the book's introduction, then what hope do the readers have?

Technically, the book contains virtually no new ideas. Although he repeately reminds us that he has been working in isolation for the past 20 years, finallizing and polishing his ideas in private, the fact is that amlost every concept he presents has already been published and analyzed. Ever heard of fractals? Chaos theory? Computer modelling?

The real clue that this book is a loser is that it is self published by "Wolfram Media" ... nothing is more pathetic than a multi-millionaire that can afford to indulge his intellectual fantasies. Question: Doesnt Wolfram have any close friends that had the guts to tell him the book was hollow?

The book is a rambling, chaotic mess, with no clear point.

Dont waste your time or money.


Rating:
Summary: Even a Genius needs an Editor
Review: Wolfram is a genius, but after reading this book I've concluded that even a genius can benefit from peer review and a good editor. At 1200+ pages, Wolfram's tome is chock full of big ideas, speculations, and a plethora of graphics, tables, charts, and diagrams; it is also written for the layman, though more scientific types will enjoy the material, of course. I too was eagerly waiting for the publication of his book, but as I finished it, I was somewhat let-down as I turned the last page. There are some good ideas, lucid examples, and wonderful graphics; but the book is also shot through with sections that are rambling, speculative, wordy, repetitive, and vague. Overall, it's worth reading, but I wished it could have been trimmed down to 200 or 300 pages.

One of Wolfram's solid main ideas is this: Simple computational rules can generate complex, seemingly unpredictable random-looking behavior, and do so deterministically. The randomness in these systems is generated by the system itself (note: this is *unlike* chaos theory, where the uncertainty in a system results from the systems sensitive dependence on initial conditions which get amplified as time progresses). The behavior of these systems cannot be determined ahead of time (i.e. there are no closed-form solutions), so one must perform all the computations in order to see how the systems evolves over time.

Wolfram then takes us on a wonderful tour of a wide variety of systems -- mostly focusing on cellular automata -- showing again and again how some simple rules yield complex behavior, and beyond a certain point, additional system complexity doesn't add much more complexity to the results. He then goes on to show how these findings might apply to a variety of natural phenomenon - fluid flow, snowflakes, mollusk shells, tiger's stripes. These are all plausible applications of his ideas, and the first chapters make for good reading.

Moving into the second half of the book, a few negatives become more prominent. Wolfram tries to force-fit his ideas into all areas. He tries less convincingly (in my opinion) to apply his ideas to free will, entropy, space and time, gravity, evolution and other areas. Also, his hubris shows through - from the almost complete lack of references to previous work except his own, to his frequent use of the pronoun "I", to his sweeping conclusions. For example, he says (on p. 726) that his theory "has vastly richer implications...than any single collection of laws in science" when talking about his "principle of computational equivalence."

Furthermore, while he makes strong claims in some areas, in others he prefaces his comments with "my guess" or "I suspect" and "my strong belief" which puts some of his theses in the realm of speculation and intuitions rather than "a new kind of science" with a firmer foundation. Finally, the fact that it's difficult to determine if some complex observed phenomenon is caused by the simple rules he describes OR by other more complex rules, seems to make this new science untestable -- and again makes some of his theses seem more speculative than scientific.

Overall, I found some of the ideas in the first half of the book about complexity arising from cellular automata and other simple systems to be very interesting and on solid ground. But taking that idea and stretching it too far in the course of 1200 pages made for a slightly trying read. Certainly the future of science will ultimately determine if Wolfram's ideas and speculations are significant, and worthy of five-stars. But overall, I'll give Wolfram's book 3 stars, since it didn't live up to the hype, though the first half was solid & interesting.