Hilarious pseudo-review of Wolfram's pompous A New Kind of Science. Not quite as funny as the famous Amazon A New Kind of Review, but great title.
Avid readers with too much time on their hands have claimed to see all sorts of bizarre items while exploring class 3 and 4 automata [see fig. 2]. These include images of Jesus, Elvis, crop circle designs, the words "Paul (Erdös) is Dead", and Jesus in an Elvis jumpsuit.
I used to do complex systems research at the Santa Fe Institute. I read Wolfram's book. I mostly liked it - it's a nice introduction to complexity theory and why complex systems are interesting. It's also surprisingly shallow, lacking any rigorous foundation (quick, what's the mathematical definition of "complex cellular automaton") or references to 50 years of preceding research.
As seen on jwz
culturebooks
  2003-08-01 03:05 Z