A New Kind of Science - Stephen Wolfram

Noted scientist Stephen Wolfram shares his perspective of how the unexpected results of simple computer experiments have forced him to consider a whole new way of looking at processes in our universe. Series: "Frontiers of Knowledge" [4/2003] [Science] [Show ID: 7153]

• Category

  Education

[MrMidas13]

why r so many comments negative about his sense of self? he created some products wrote about some ideas, and is proud of it. who's "supposed" to benifit from the labors of "his" life? altruist bastards.

[Tim Taylor]

Most people are so full of themselves that they calculate how not to appear so in order to increase other people's positive opinions of themselves. He seems like a wunderkind whose self-aggrandizement is so set in and long held that it is an aside to him and to anyone who cares to listen to his ideas. To me it is merely amusing and endearing in a way as it would be to anyone who understands human behavior. I care about what he is saying, and some of it has been said before, but some not.

[Chrissy Philp]

I bought his book when it first came out. This is not new. The Book of Changes - an ancient Chinese Oracle - is working on this principle - on (yang) and off (yin). Leibnitz was impressed with the I Ching - it was Leibnitz who designed the binary system that through Boole and Peirce is the basis of our computer system. Randomness is called mutability in symbolic language. When the on off system reaches eight possibilities mutability occurs. 

[linuxisbetter0]

you are neglecting an important qualification: compressed.

[Joflouside]

Stephen Wolfram in Photoshop & Illustrator please !! :)

[Umby64]

This is fucking beautiful

[neocons1345]

I really tired to follow him and he is on a whole different level...Amazing guy and I respect him a lot...

[libertarianjury]

This man is a wonderful human being, my favorite kind of person, a free thinker, and an innovator. I would love to be able to talk with him. Very interested to see if he's met and spoken with John Nash, or if he also appreciates the ideas of F. A. Hayek. I would like to see him design a robot with a brain that has a functional replica of every portion of the human brain, only optimized. The power is there RIGHT now. I would love to speak with him about the indicators, parallel projects.

[economicfreedom8591]

He lost me at 1:02:48 when he says that it's "hard" to distinguish random radio noise from a compressed intelligent signal. If true, it follows that it's hard to distinguish an intelligent signal from random radio noise — in fact, it would be hard to distinguish any sequence we judge to be intelligent from random noise, including Wolfram's talk. That two things are computationally equivalent doesn't mean they cannot be distinguished; it means processes other than computation come into play.