215 of 223 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The Emperor's New Kind of Clothes, April 10, 2003
This review is from: A New Kind of Science: A New Kind of Science Explorer bundle (Hardcover)
This review took almost one year. Unlike many previous referees (rank them by Amazon.com's "most helpful" feature) I read all 1197 pages including notes. Just to make sure I won't miss the odd novel insight hidden among a million trivial platitudes.
On page 27 Wolfram explains "probably the single most surprising discovery I have ever made:" a simple program can produce output that seems irregular and complex.
This has been known for six decades. Every computer science (CS) student knows the dovetailer, a very simple 2 line program that systematically lists and executes all possible programs for a universal computer such as a Turing machine (TM). It computes all computable patterns, including all those in Wolfram's book, embodies the well-known limits of computability, and is basis of uncountable CS exercises.
Wolfram does know (page 1119) Minsky's very simple universal TMs from the 1960s. Using extensive simulations, he finds a slightly simpler one. New science? Small addition to old science. On page 675 we find a particularly simple cellular automaton (CA) and Matthew Cook's universality proof(?). This might be the most interesting chapter. It reflects that today's PCs are more powerful systematic searchers for simple rules than those of 40 years ago. No new paradigm though.
Was Wolfram at least first to view programs as potential explanations of everything? Nope. That was Zuse. Wolfram mentions him in exactly one line (page 1026): "Konrad Zuse suggested that [the universe] could be a continuous CA." This is totally misleading. Zuse's 1967 paper suggested the universe is DISCRETELY computable, possibly on a DISCRETE CA just like Wolfram's. Wolfram's causal networks (CA's with variable toplogy, chapter 9) will run on any universal CA a la Ulam & von Neumann & Conway & Zuse. Page 715 explains Wolfram's "key unifying idea" of the "principle of computational equivalence:" all processes can be viewed as computations. Well, that's exactly what Zuse wrote 3 decades ago.
Chapter 9 (2nd law of thermodynamics) elaborates (without reference) on Zuse's old insight that entropy cannot really increase in deterministically computed systems, although it often SEEMS to increase. Wolfram extends Zuse's work by a tiny margin, using today's more powerful computers to perform experiments as suggested in Zuse's 1969 book. I find it embarassing how Wolfram tries to suggest it was him who shifted a paradigm, not the legendary Zuse.
Some reviews cite Wolfram's previous reputation as a physicist and software entrepreneur, giving him the benefit of the doubt instead of immediately dismissing him as just another plagiator. Zuse's reputation is in a different league though: He built world's very first general purpose computers (1935-1941), while Wolfram is just one of many creators of useful software (Mathematica). Remarkably, in his history of computing (page 1107) Wolfram appears to try to diminuish Zuse's contributions by only mentioning Aiken's later 1944 machine.
On page 465 ff (and 505 ff on multiway systems) Wolfram asks whether there is a simple program that computes the universe. Here he sounds like Schmidhuber in his 1997 paper "A Computer Scientist's View of Life, the Universe, and Everything." Schmidhuber applied the above-mentioned simple dovetailer to all computable universes. His widely known writings come out on top when you google for "computable universes" etc, so Wolfram must have known them too, for he read an "immense number of articles books and web sites" (page xii) and executed "more than a hundred thousand mouse miles" (page xiv). He endorses Schmidhuber's "no-CA-but-TM approach" (page 486, no reference) but not his suggestion of using Levin's asymptotically optimal program searcher (1973) to find our universe's code.
On page 469 we are told that the simplest program for the data is the most probable one. No mention of the very science based on this ancient principle: Solomonoff's inductive inference theory (1960-1978); recent optimality results by Merhav & Feder & Hutter. Following Schmidhuber's "algorithmic theories of everything" (2000), short world-explaining programs are necessarily more likely, provided the world is sampled from a limit-computable prior distribution. Compare Li & Vitanyi's excellent 1997 textbook on Kolmogorov complexity.
On page 628 ff we find a lot of words on human thinking and short programs. As if this was novel! Wolfram seems totally unaware of Hutter's optimal universal rational agents (2001) based on simple programs a la Solomonoff & Kolmogorov & Levin & Chaitin.
Wolfram suggests his simple programs will contribute to fine arts (page 11), neither mentioning existing, widely used, very short, fractal-based programs for computing realistic images of mountains and plants, nor the only existing art form explicitly based on simple programs: Schmidhuber's low-complexity art.
Wolfram talks a lot about reversible CAs but little about Edward Fredkin & Tom Toffoli who pioneered this field. He ignores Wheeler's "it from bit," Tegmark & Greenspan & Petrov & Marchal's papers, Moravec & Kurzweil's somewhat related books, and Greg Egan's fun SF on CA-based universes (Permutation City, 1995).
When the book came out some non-expert journalists hyped it without knowing its contents. Then cognoscenti had a look at it and recognized it as a rehash of old ideas, plus pretty pictures. And the reviews got worse and worse. As far as I can judge, positive reviews were written only by people without basic CS education and little knowledge of CS history. Some biologists and even a few physicists initially were impressed because to them it really seemed new. Maybe Wolfram's switch from physics to CS explains why he believes his thoughts are radical, not just reinventions of the wheel.
But he does know Goedel and Zuse and Turing. He must see that his own work is minor in comparison. Why does he desparately try to convince us otherwise? When I read Wolfram's first praise of the originality of his own ideas I just had to laugh. The tenth time was annoying. The hundredth time was boring. And that was my final feeling when I laid down this extremely repetitive book:exhaustion and boredom. In hindsight I know I could have saved my time. But at least I can warn others.
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26 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If we could only have a peek at Sasquatch's family photos..., November 4, 2003
This review is from: A New Kind of Science: A New Kind of Science Explorer bundle (Hardcover)
Okay, so the Abominable Snowman walks up and asks if you'd like to see his family photo albums. All 1200+ pages of them. Maybe you don't quite 'get' what Sasquatch is about or why he'd want to share intimate family moments with a complete stranger, but, still, you KNOW you have to have a LOOK.
This is very much the case with Stephen Wolfram's A NEW KIND OF SCIENCE. I picked up my copy from amazon.com for considerably less than $50.00 (US), which, by weight, makes it one of the most reasonably priced books I have ever purchased -- especially among relatively limited printings, which include many, if not the vast majority, of 'standard' works in computer science.
(Hey, for under fifty bucks we should all sample anything capable of creating as much uproar among scientifically literate folks as, say, THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST created among the [selectively] scientifically oblivious.)
Unlike some other reviewers, I don't fault Wolfram if he fails to communicate as smoothly or as tersely as every reader might like. After all, we are taking part in an information transfer (mind dump?) from a man who, seeking the counsel of intellectual peers, has likely, in the apparent paucity of such during 10 years of secretive research, all too often ended up talking only to HIMSELF!
Nor do I fault Wolfram for a possible titular allusion to Galileo's DIALOGUES ON TWO NEW SCIENCES. Absent gods, pride is not "hubris," in the classical sense. Alas, Wolfram, like Darwin, has pointed the way to mechanisms that explain organized complex structures without apparent intentional, external 'design.' (Doubtless, Darwin didn't invent evolution any more than Wolfram invented cellular automata. But both men are accomplished synthesizers, discovering and/or articulating simple and elegant organizing principles where others encounter only chaos and befuddlement.)
Furthermore, even if we were to sift Wolfram's entire volume and find it devoid of any truly new or original insight, the work would still be invaluable as a compendium of ideas from the fields already referenced, especially chaos, complexity, and self-organizing structures. (If we are sometimes unable to discern between Wolfram's own ideas and someone else's, we can, at least, rejoice in his championing ideas that are important and timely, regardless of 'authorship.')
Not to belabor this point, but, depending on the direction from which one approaches a problem, it isn't always clear that s/he has traversed the identical thought processes (or courses of study) as someone else. With no malice aforethought, in mathematics and science we often encounter 'opportunities' for inadvertent reinvention and rediscovery. One author has referred to such as "mathematical epiphanies", alluding to the joy of finding even well-worn truths by and for oneself. In this sense, I feel, Wolfram might be expressing his own delight in making certain ideas his 'own,' even if, in the end, they turn out to be ideas that, with or without his knowledge, he might not have originated. In this respect, I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, realizing that others have, for their own reaons, been less charitable. At the same time, I am likewise unwilling to venture a guess regarding that (and how much) of which someone researching and writing in any of Wolfram's many field(s) should or should not have been aware.
In his further defense, however, successful business leaders are often oriented towards results rather than toward bestowing either credit or blame. (I am reminded that the great American patriot Thomas Paine added little to the thoughts of Voltaire, Rousseau, and others from the French Enlightenment. Nevertheless, his popular re-packaging of the 'higher criticism' in THE AGE OF REASON freed minds and pens and tongues that, otherwise, might never have come to know, via the original French, what Paine so eloquently set forth in an iconoclastic salvo the likes of which had not been heard since Luther's theses ignited the Reformation. And, then, even Luther benefitted from a sympathetic publisher!)
If my discussion, up till now, has been somewhat oblique, I have probably read more of Wolfram's book than many of the other reviewers -- far enough, actually, to have made it through the crucial section on "The Principle of Computational Equivalence." Until that point, I must confess, I had been viewing cellular automata as models of and, as such, merely ISOMORPHIC TO... certain natural processes. The great realization, at which we finally arrive, is that THESE machines and the machines at work in natural processes are the SAME [ABSTRACT] MACHINES! (The equivalence of two machines that produce identical outputs from identical inputs is not a revelation -- What is exciting is how Wolfram bridges the gap between the behaviors of man-made machines and naturally occuring 'machines.') Much as Darwin used a brilliant analogy to bridge the apparent gap between artificial and natural selection, Wolfram has articulated a bridge between artificial and natural 'machines' via a unifying computational principle.
I greatly appreciate Wolfram's exposition of some of his own intellectual 'epiphanies' in a form considerably more entertaining than most academic papers... and better organized than many personal journals or research notebooks. If time attests to the impact of these ideas (as I have intimated via comparisons to Galileo, Paine, and Darwin), I believe the time the reader invests to understand them will be well rewarded.
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