Rating: 
Summary: autonomic drivel
Review: "i have seen the future"..and its not a new kind of science. There is no science, no insite, no new big thing, no gratification, no a-ha, no clue here. I too can write simple software programs that mimic autonomic functions, anyone can, that ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT MEAN that the entire universe started from a few....I started laughing at page 3.....
Rating: 
Summary: Extremely boring...
Review: I had read a lot of reviews before I bought this book, so I was expecting some disappointment. Still, I found it extremely boring and repetitive, as if making the same claims again and again could replace clear and precise argumentation. The style is also very poor, often affecting an otherwise attractive idea. S. Wolfram is clearly not gifted for science "vulgarisation". As many mentioned, you also have to go through the arrogant tone of the self-proclaimed genius: while some may find it refreshing that a scientist stand out for his ideas (I certainly do), and even excuse some overwhelming, S. Wolfram is going far beyond, too far. All in all, the previous critics do not affect the substance of this book. It's very rich indeed, though a lot less than it pretends to be, and far less original and ground-breaking. S. Wolfram's problem seems to be that he's claiming too much (nothing short of a new paradigm), and in order to prove his point, he can't decide between the weight of examples and the accuracy of a strong argument. As he mentions, he could have written ten of thousands of pages, but had to make it shorter while still using extensive footnotes: it shows ! In my opinion, he should have made one shorter, clearer and straightfoward book to generalize his ideas (accessible to all public, and somehow speculative), and other publications to support his claims (extensive and detailed technical papers directed to his peers). To summ it up, this book is a big (litterally !) disappointment -and it's not even fun to read !
Rating: 
Summary: Who can say if he's right or not?
Review: I see a lot of reviews for A New Kind of Science which are NOT book reviews. Many seem to be coming from uninformed people giving their "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down". Some claim that they've read it, some claim they've skimmed it, and some don't say. I'll tell you: I have not read this book. What am I doing reviewing it then? Right now this review will act more as a placeholder, but I have every intention of fleshing it out in the near future. Grab Mathematica off of your favorite P2P network, install it, buy this book, and then work through the code while you write this book. Then email me with your thoughts. Please. That's my intention. We'll see if I can keep this promise...
Rating: 
Summary: The profound tends to be simple.
Review: The profound tends to be rooted in simplicity. Having read the previous reviews, it is clear why this 'new kind of science' may take many years to be fully appreciated. There are tremendous ideas at play in Wolfram's thoughts and a casual reader looking for the literary elegance of Richard Feynman or Stephen Hawking will be easily disappointed. An excellent writer Wolfram is not. He flat-out lacks people skills and it shows in his writing. - Though not intentionally, he tends to come across a bit aloof. But all this is easily forgiven once you lock into his message. The content of this book is so RICH and so FRESH that I STRONGLY RECOMMEND THE READ!!!
Rating:
Summary: A Fresh Look
Review: A New Kind of Science includes a fresh approach for looking at the world. While it includes a lot of speculation, which of the soft sciences don't? The book has an excellent index for re-reading. An example of a surprising conclusion is that natural selection and evolution may not be inter-related, even though each appears to follow its own simple set of rules. There are many other such surprising views that may well incite a fresh look into stale topics. For those who want to play with cellular automata, but do not have access to Mathematica, this reader has found that spreadsheets can be formatted to show a relatively small number of steps and how changes to the rules and initial conditions change the patterns. While Dr. Wolfram shows that the most amazing patterns occur after thousands or millions of steps, you can still get into a feel for it by playing around with your own models. The book contains everything you need to do it yourself. In short order, you will appreciate his 20 years of working with these programs.
Rating:
Summary: A new environmental respecting Science!
Review: Really a big step to a better future,also if i hated matematics i had ejoyed this way of looking at the reality with new eyes and the help of a computer used how it is by itself.
This book made me dream about intelligent beings made by wind or water stream both in the earth and in near planets!
If you say impossible read it and than i think you'l say only unlikely ,such big will be your surprise.
If we need to save this planet this is a good way to try and i hope we shall all read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Simple Rules for Simple Minds
Review: The idea at the core of this book--that following simple rules can produce outcomes of great complexity--is an absolutely compelling and sea-changing notion. No question about it. But Wolfram's ego is immense -- granted, he is by all accounts a genius. But his constant need to remind us of this gets in the way of what would otherwise be a compelling text. And, in fact, he is not alone. He gives credit to many who have walked these paths before him, people like Murray Gell-Mann, E.O. Wilson, John Holland. The science of complexity is hot right now, with a number of different treatments shedding light on how this new kind of science can apply to fields as disparate as physics, economics and social science. Those folks have all written books, many quite readable, about the important findings of studies of complexity. The fact that Wolfram adopts this tone flies in the face of what he has discovered--individual agents, acting on their own, can impact each other's behaviors and produce effects beyond predictability. If only he had given the individual agents (in this case, his dear readers) more credit...
Rating:
Summary: What it is, and why it disappoints
Review: This is a book of ruminations about cellular automata. It is chiefly concerned with the way that the state of a system evolves when deterministic rules are applied to it. The simplest system is a single point in either state 0 or state 1. The transition rule could be that the state "0" changes to state "1", and state "1" changes to state "0". That rule can be expressed as follows. {1->0, 0->1} If the system's initial state is 1, then the transition rule (repeatedly applied) yields the following alternating pattern of states. 1
0
1
0
.
. For hundreds of pages the author discusses the behavior of 1-dimensional automata built from 3-cell transition rules. The 2^3=8 different states of a 3-cell cluster can be written in binary notation from 000 up to 111. The cell in the middle can transition to either of two binary states, yielding a total of 2^8=256 rules. Most rules lead to periodically repeating behaviors, with short periods like the alternating pattern shown above. An exception is rule 30 (30 in binary is 00011110; these bits the right-hand-side values for the 8 transitions). rule 30:
{ 111->0, 110->0, 101->0, 100->1, 011->1, 010->1, 001->1, 000->0 } When applied to an initial state of a single 1 surrounded by 0's, rule 30 generates the following pattern (developing downward from the top row). The array can be displayed as a bitmap of black and white pixels, producing a visualization of the evolving state of the horizontal rows. ..00000000100000000..
..00000001110000000..
..00000011001000000..
..00000110111100000..
..00001100100010000..
..00011011110111000..
..00110010000100100..
..01101111001111110.. What excites many people about such rules (and about replacement grammars in general) is that applying the rule to an input string produces new strings whose characteristics are hard to predict. Plus, the patterns in the resulting visualization look pretty cool and are suggestive of all sorts of things found in nature. It's very easy to write computer code that will generate the patterns based on input rules, so anybody can play the game. Lots of people have implemented cellular automata and been fascinated that the behavior is so sensitive to the choice of input string and transition rules. Watching the patterns unfold is a bit like playing the slot machines. So many possibilities. So fun to watch. Addictive to play. Great to show your friends. A meme that keeps on meming. Search the Web for "one-dimensional cellular automata" and "applet" and you will find examples that you can run in your browser. What bothers many readers about the book is that it is like an undergraduate honors project gone haywire. Page after page of printouts of these things. Thousands of them. And with endless streams of the impressions they made on the author. "My Daily Journal of Cellular Automata" would have been a fair title. Wolfram's inflated sense of their importance, and his own, is evident in the copyright statement: Discoveries and ideas introduced in this book, whether presented at length or not, and the legal rights and goodwill associated with them, represent valuable property of Stephen Wolfram .. Thus he lays claim to every cellular automaton and any application thereof. Pretty annoying, coming from someone arriving late to the automaton party. He concludes of the book proper (pp. 844-845, just before his 350 additional pages of "notes") that .. building on what I have discovered in this book .. there is nothing fundamentally special about us. .. For my discoveries imply that whether the underlying system is a human brain, a turbulent fluid, or a cellular automaton, the behavior it exhibits will correspond to a computation of equivalent sophistication. .. [W]hat my discoveries and the Principle of Computational Equivalence now show is that .. cellular automata can achieve exactly the same level of computational sophistication as anything else. Wolfram discovery/epiphany appears to be that all algorithms can be computed by a simple model. An example of such a model, called the "Turing machine", is taught every semester to computer science students worldwide. It excites many people that the physical world is inherently computable, allowing computational simulations to have predictive value. It is bizarre to read Wolfram represent that he is the author of this insight.
Rating:
Summary: A new kind of review
Review: Why you are reading this review I can only imagine how fortunate you must feel to be reading my review. This review is the product of my lifetime of experience in meeting important people and thinking deep thoughts. This is a new kind of review, and will no doubt influence the way you
think about the world around you and the way you think of yourself. Bigger than infinity Although my review deserves thousands of pages to articulate, I am limiting many of my deeper thoughts to only single characters. I encourage readers of my review to dedicate the many years required to fully absorb the significance of what I am writing here. Fortunately, we live in exactly the time when my review can be widely disseminated by "internet" technology and stored on "digital media", allowing current and future scholars to delve more deeply into my original and insightful use of commas, numbers, and letters. My place in history My review allows, for the first time, a complete and total understanding not only of this but *every single*
book ever written. I call this "the principle of book equivalence." Future generations will decide the relative merits of this review compared with, for example, the works of Shakespeare. This effort will open new realms of scholarship. I am the author of all things It is staggering to contemplate that all the great works of literature can be derived from the letters I use in writing this review. I am pleased to have shared them with you, and hereby grant you the liberty to use up to twenty (20) of them consecutively without attribution. Any use of additional characters in print must acknowledge this review as source material since it contains, implicitly or explicitly, all future written documents.
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Summary: Subliminal messages!! That's the genius
Review: I've lost all respect for Oxford and Caltech. How could a supposed genius waste 10+ years compiling 800+ pages of worthless pictures? Shame on me for being so naive. One might think after a few hundred pages of pointless patterns, the author would shift to explaining the profound implications promised by such a project. Unfortunately, no. I got the point after the first 10 patterns. Yes, seemingly complex systems can be born by simple rules. Very good. Where's the real-world applications promised by reviewers of this "book"? Where are the involved Mathematica excerpts for the reader to experiment with? One would think the material presented would get more intricate, involved, multifarious, etc. but that again is not the case. Wolfram stretches a simple concept deserving a page's worth devotion through almost a thousand pages. The promise was that this simple concept would be the foundation for addressing further topics stretching from computer science to biology. Didn't happen. Seriously, do I need to have a whole chapter with whole pages displaying the first 4000 digits of pi or tables showing fractions in decimal form?? Do I need a graph of the prime numbers?? Do I need hundreds of pages displaying rules Wolfram used for cellular automata with no accompanying applications/implications?? Even worse, Wolfram makes assumptions for the reader; most of which any remotely intelligent reader would have negated themselves when they were FIVE. Wolfram's success with this "book" is getting people to pay money for such a piece of garbage. This book is merely a never-been desperately attempting to leave a mark on science with recursive patterns any four-year old could generate. The thousands of patterns must carry subliminal messages. That's the only explanation for including so many. This "book" is useless and my former math professor, a math Ph. D from Carnegie-Mellon and ironically a Mathematica fan, agrees. However, the notes section that follows the main text isn't that bad; it's sad when a book's corresponding notes have more worth than the main content. If don't know how to spell "science" this book's for you, kids. Shame on me for being suckered. Really, those select preview excerpts from this page are deceiving.
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