I have a long standing dislike of wolfram after reading "A New Kind of Science" and questioning him at a talk he gave..
-mouser
Care to give details? I also sensed that somewhat from what little I know about him. PM me if you don't want to be public.
-superboyac
well.. it's been several years since i read the book, so my memories are a little bit hazy, but the central premise of the book might have been controversial 100 years ago, but wolfram spends 100 pages building slowly up to an idea that he is sure is so revolutionary that the reader won't possibly be able to grasp it: Complex behavior can emerge from the interaction of simple rules. There's nothing controversial or surprising about that claim -- it's a completely accepted idea.
Wolfram blatantly refuses to acknowledge and site huge bodies of work on dynamical system theory and chaos theory, probably because doing so would illuminate how old these ideas are that he is trying to claim are the foundation of his newly invented Wolfram Science. This is what happens when you self publish, don't use an editor, and don't feel obligated to be responsible to the existing literature.
On a more subtle note -- I think there is an area where he is fundamentally wrong about, which i talked to him about. He focuses on, and is most interested in, interactive rules that produce unpredictable behaviors. He rehashes the emergence of some well-known dynamics that emerge in the natural world, like the beautiful fractal patterns found on shells -- and wants to extend such unpredictable complex behaviors to other areas of physics and the natural world. I think a fundamental and subtle problem with this is that on a macro-level, the real world is HIGHLY predictable and regular -- and that fact is essential to our successful and intelligent interaction with it. Since I come from an AI/Machine Learning background, this is a particular point of interest for me. The very kind of extreme pseudo-random emergent behaviors that he is so excited about and thinks are the most important, are the kinds i think are least interesting and least relevant to understanding the natural world. There are beautiful mathematical issues that came out of the work on chaos theory, like attractor dyanmics, that *are* significant and important -- and are completely ignored by Wolfram. Very very disapointing book.
Recent Posts
