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Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?
« Last post by mouser on November 13, 2010, 01:38 PM »Occasionally interesting, often repetitious, and chock full of the author's inflated notions of self-importance. Much like the Wolfram|Alpha engine itself, there's a good chance there's far less here than meets the eye.
I also have an occasional problem with his making personal claims to "discoveries" and insights that have obviously been made by others long before him. Either this guy has an ego the size of a truck, or he is painfully oblivious to all the mathematical research going on around him.
i've read it and would echo everything you've said but suggest you are understating the crappiness.
i'm not sure if i've already written about how irritated i was with the book here on this forum or just in countless emails when i read it a couple of years ago.
The bottom line is that while the book may help inspire you to think about some interesting things, it much better used as an example for scientists about why its such a bad idea to isolate yourself from the rest of the scientific community and try to write an epic book without paying any attention to what anyone else is doing for 20 years and without getting any feedback.
The things that are genuinely interesting in the book were noted and explored better by smarter people decades ago, and go completely uncited in the book. and the rest of the book is wolfram over and over and over telling you how amazing and insane and hard to understand the concept of complexity emerging from simple rules is -- something which became completely non-controversial a long long time ago.
Just working from a faint memory now, but I also think there are some other more interesting problems with the book. I had the chance to press Wolfram about these at a talk he gave once. For example i think there is a central and interesting problem with Wolfram's book, in that the kinds of emergent systems he is most interested in are these that are largely unpredictable without explicit single-step simulation.. and he connects this with natural phenomena (and many have explored long ago fractal patterns in nature, snail shells, etc.); but when considering the physical world one can't help but be impressed by how incredibly predictable much of it is at long timescales, for example paths of planets, etc. I think i would argue that these "unpredictable" emergent systems that wolfram focuses on as the key to understanding the natural world are precisely NOT the kinds of systems we see for functionally significant large-scale systems in nature. But now we are getting into some esoteric stuff.
