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
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