[ba-unrev-talk] A New Kind of Science
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/5/14/233629/069 (01)
Stephen Wolfram's latest book on doing science with cellular automata (CA). (02)
"Stephen Wolfram has finally published his A New Kind of Science. The
culmination of twenty years of private and furtive work by the creator of
Mathematica, A New Kind of Science purports to revolutionize science and
mathematics through the application of cellular automata. Normally,
claimants with such hubris are laughed off by serious scientists, but
Wolfram is arguably one of the brightest minds in science. With this book,
Wolfram begins his attempt to take his science to the mainstream and put
his name besides those of Einstein and Newton. Here are several articles
from Forbes, the New Scientist and the New York Times on the book and
Wolfram. " (03)
A whole bunch of moons back, I coaxed a cellular automata to play the game
of life (which it will do anyway) using an expert system in each
cell. That got written up in Dr. Dobb's Journal. It strikes me that a
huge amount of what goes on in the world is driven by nearest neighbor
interactions, which CA are good at modeling. Imagine combining discovery
systems based, perhaps, on evolutionary programming techniques, coupled
with knowledge stored in each cell, and training that on lots of
interesting data. While you're at it, imagine compute cycles we probably
don't have the energy to drive. Fun thinking, nevertheless. (04)
Cheers
Jack (05)