Stephen Wolfram's Book: A New Kind of Science

[sinamoeini]

thanks dude for the video

[flexibartrampolin]

His mistakes are on the philosophical level. His theory is speculative and it goes like this: I have the simple rule to explain anything. You just can't use it because the world is much too comlicated to see it clearly. Well, that is just speculative philosophy of nature. Heraclite did that, Epicurus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Leibniz, many others did that, string theory is considered to be an example too. None of these theories is better than any other on the philosophical scale ... sadly.

[HakerzTM]

Stephen Wolfram is very smart

[edgaritoaqui]

the point of Wolfram's books is that the universe is indeed a Matrix!

[petexii]

Great book, but this guy does a crap (boring and oversimplified) job of discussing it.

[itzjezme]

Politics and government are great examples of the simple becoming VERY complex...

[jigarsalman]

You skipped many of the chapters? You dont know much of math! Excuse me? Please take off Aristotles name right this second from ALL youre sites. I will let aristotle`s teacher Plato speak now "Over the door [of the ACADEMY] to it was written: "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here."" Math is the "Queen of Sciences".

[flexibartrampolin]

@jigarsalman Come on now, Explain to me what math is. Your posting sounds a little arrogant to me. Why don't you encourage him to study math - and even if it's just for the sake of understanding the book?

[ppaperlilies]

it's not truly a kind of new science!

when you done this book,you will realize

the work wolfram doing neither has not successfully touch the major structure of the universe that we feeled everyday ,nor giving

us a original principal law. it cost $50,

and collect a lot of works,but science is more than a large amount of collected information.

[FrankFacade]

by suggesting a discrete physical universe where the next state is determined by the state of the previous increment, via the fixed rules for the evolution of the system.

Do you have any thoughts on free will?

[MrCropper]

Because the system has rules for evolution that does not make it a determined system. That is the whole point of Wolfram's book.

[FrankFacade]

no. even wolfram wouldn't be this mistaken. without ranting about what a deterministic finite state machine is, etc., I'll just say I think you don't understand what 'deterministic' means. (more...)

[FrankFacade]

by definition a cell. autom. is deterministic (unless a random var. is involved, which wolfram doesn't use), even if it's maximally entropic (cf komolgorov complexity or g. chaitin's lectures here on youtube). indeed the COMBINATION of having maximal entropy AND being deterministic is one chief point of the book.

[FrankFacade]

what makes cell. autom. deterministic? the rules specify PRECISELY ONE (n+1)th state FOR EACH POSSIBLE nth state, thus if two independent systems with the same rules are in identical states at some nth point, then they will be in identical states at the kth iteration, for any k>n.

[FrankFacade]

(as an interesting aside, this is sometimes actually just called 'semi-deterministic, (though this may not be predominant in the literature) whereby 'fully deterministic' refers to the special case where the automaton can be run backwards, deterministically.) ;)

[FrankFacade]

hey, I have no problem with you not knowing what you're talking about and going on and on about something you don't understand. It's mildly entertaining, so no worries mate.

Now if you were actually teaching children, I would have a problem with THAT. But that's not bound to happen.

[MeS0Awesome]

"Because the system has rules for evolution that does not make it a determined system. That is the whole point of Wolfram's book."

The use of determined in FF's post atop this thread refers to "deterministic." This is NOT synonymous with "capable of being pre-determined," which is how you are now trying to use the word, I believe.

Let's not be so slippery.

[sourcerror]

"Because the system has rules for evolution that does not make it a determined system. That is the whole point of Wolfram's book."

genetic programming, John Koza

[FrankFacade]

Peikoff talks about free will on a clip you've probably heard. Wolfram is positing an utterly deterministic universe. What are your thoughts on the issue?

[MrCropper]

How is Wolfram "positing an utterly deterministic universe"?

[FrankFacade]

Hey, no one expects you to have an opinion about everything. I was just curious. Seems like something you'd be into.

Cheers.

[FrankFacade]

Human's are not a sufficient counter-example to the second law of TD. Why? Humans break down far more cellular order than are capable of "building up." Your scabby knee might heal, but before that happens you'll have transformed over a billion intricate cells into brown, high entropy, slop.

[FrankFacade]

you said "how order can result from chaos." Other way around, friend, is what the book is about :)

[FrankFacade]

Okay. I can see this both ways. The axioms of the cellular automata world are pure order. From there we get apparent randomness, high entropy states that are difficult to calculate without actually running the system. THEN we get emergence of higher order. But that's emergence theory. I might expect you to oppose it, judging by your other philosophical views.

[MrCropper]

"difficult to calculate without actually running the system."

IMPOSSIBLE to calculate. That was a major theme in the book.

[FrankFacade]

Well one way to calculate is to run the system, thus an upper bound exists on the time complexity. Proving that the upper bound is also the lower bound is extremely difficult and undecidable in many non-trivial cases. The point is that it's DIFFICULT, regardless of whether it is proven to have MAXIMAL ENTROPY. "Difficult" is weak enough to be true and strong enough to support my statement, so no use nit-picking.

[FrankFacade]

Have you looked at any emergence theory? I'd be curious as to your thoughts about strong emergence, for example.

[cropperb]

Stephen Wolfram has a 1 hour and 45 minute video about this book on Google Video. I HIGHLY recommend it. Its 2 hours of your time that won't be wasted. Watch it twice. And turn off the TV.

[TakeAleft]

let me just say, hat im muh more fond of you rpost concerning only one book... better to get into depth than to browse too quickly through

[TakeAleft]

sorry... my keyboard sucks, it should have said: "that im much more"...

[MetaMorphy]

Hmmm, yes, the second law is difficult. However, systems tend to break done really doesn't get to the heart of the concept. However, to save the idea you have, a subsystem can have its entropy decrease while the system as a whole still increases---You have to take the system to be something that exists before a more interesting object you might want to call a system develops.

[cropperb]

Are you saying there are "rules" before there are any "rules" visible?

And saying that the system as a whole increases in entropy while a subsystem decreases entropy... Hmmm... It seems the system as a whole must have gone through a state of general entropy decrease in order to get to the point where entropy can generally increase, no?

[FrankFacade]

entropy is not what's conserved. That's the whole point. A glass of water, considered as an isolated universe, yet placed next to the target of a nuclear blast will experience a gain in potential energy, apparently from nowhere. Now look at the whole picture, the apparent accumulation of heat is rather a subprocess of a much larger dissipation of heat. That's the idea.