Product Description

"This book promises to revolutionize science as we know it" - Daily Telegraph "Stephen's magnum opus may be the book of the decade if not the century" - Arthur C Clarke Long-awaited work from one of the world's most respected scientists presents a series of dramatic discoveries never before made public. Starting with a collection of computer experiments, Wolfram shows how their unexpected results force a whole new way of looking at the universe. A seminal work of enormous importance. Includes over 950 illustrations. BBC documentary in development.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #125390 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1192 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Physics and computer science genius Stephen Wolfram, sets his sights on a daunting goal: understanding the universe. A New Kind of Science is a gorgeous, 1,280-page tome more than a decade in the making. With patience, insight, and self-confidence to spare, Wolfram outlines a fundamental new way of modelling complex systems.

On the frontier of complexity science since he was a boy, Wolfram is a champion of cellular automata--256 "programs" governed by simple non-mathematical rules. He points out that even the most complex equations fail to accurately model biological systems, but the simplest cellular automata can produce results straight out of nature--tree branches, stream eddies, and leopard spots, for instance. The graphics in A New Kind of Science show striking resemblance to the patterns we see in nature every day.

Wolfram wrote the book in a distinct style meant to make it easy to read, even for non-techies; a basic familiarity with logic is helpful but not essential. Readers will find themselves swept away by the elegant simplicity of Wolfram's ideas and the accidental artistry of the cellular automaton models. Whether or not Wolfram's revolution ultimately gives us the keys to the universe, his new science is absolutely awe-inspiring. --Therese Littleton

About the Author
Stephen Wolfram was born in London and educated at Eton, Oxford and Caltech. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1979 at the age of 20, and in the early 1980s made a series of discoveries which launched the field of complex systems research. Starting in 1986 he created Mathematica, the primary software system now used for technical computing worldwide, and the tool which made A New Kind of Science possible. Wolfram is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, Inc.—the world's leading technical software company.

Customer Reviews

The Emperor's New Kind of Clothes
This review took almost one year. Unlike many previous referees (rank them by Amazon.com's "most helpful" feature) I read all 1197 pages including notes. Just to make sure I won't miss the odd novel insight hidden among a million trivial platitudes.

On page 27 Wolfram explains "probably the single most surprising discovery I have ever made:" a simple program can produce output that seems irregular and complex.

This has been known for six decades. Every computer science (CS) student knows the dovetailer, a very simple 2 line program that systematically lists and executes all possible programs for a universal computer such as a Turing machine (TM). It computes all computable patterns, including all those in Wolfram's book, embodies the well-known limits of computability, and is basis of uncountable CS exercises.

Wolfram does know (page 1119) Minsky's very simple universal TMs from the 1960s. Using extensive simulations, he finds a slightly simpler one. New science? Small addition to old science. On page 675 we find a particularly simple cellular automaton (CA) and Matthew Cook's universality proof(?). This might be the most interesting chapter. It reflects that today's PCs are more powerful systematic searchers for simple rules than those of 40 years ago. No new paradigm though.

Was Wolfram at least first to view programs as potential explanations of everything? Nope. That was Zuse. Wolfram mentions him in exactly one line (page 1026): "Konrad Zuse suggested that [the universe] could be a continuous CA." This is totally misleading. Zuse's 1967 paper suggested the universe is DISCRETELY computable, possibly on a DISCRETE CA just like Wolfram's. Wolfram's causal networks (CA's with variable toplogy, chapter 9) will run on any universal CA a la Ulam & von Neumann & Conway & Zuse. Page 715 explains Wolfram's "key unifying idea" of the "principle of computational equivalence:" all processes can be viewed as computations. Well, that's exactly what Zuse wrote 3 decades ago.

Chapter 9 (2nd law of thermodynamics) elaborates (without reference) on Zuse's old insight that entropy cannot really increase in deterministically computed systems, although it often SEEMS to increase. Wolfram extends Zuse's work by a tiny margin, using today's more powerful computers to perform experiments as suggested in Zuse's 1969 book. I find it embarassing how Wolfram tries to suggest it was him who shifted a paradigm, not the legendary Zuse.

Some reviews cite Wolfram's previous reputation as a physicist and software entrepreneur, giving him the benefit of the doubt instead of immediately dismissing him as just another plagiator. Zuse's reputation is in a different league though: He built world's very first general purpose computers (1935-1941), while Wolfram is just one of many creators of useful software (Mathematica). Remarkably, in his history of computing (page 1107) Wolfram appears to try to diminuish Zuse's contributions by only mentioning Aiken's later 1944 machine.

On page 465 ff (and 505 ff on multiway systems) Wolfram asks whether there is a simple program that computes the universe. Here he sounds like Schmidhuber in his 1997 paper "A Computer Scientist's View of Life, the Universe, and Everything." Schmidhuber applied the above-mentioned simple dovetailer to all computable universes. His widely known writings come out on top when you google for "computable universes" etc, so Wolfram must have known them too, for he read an "immense number of articles books and web sites" (page xii) and executed "more than a hundred thousand mouse miles" (page xiv). He endorses Schmidhuber's "no-CA-but-TM approach" (page 486, no reference) but not his suggestion of using Levin's asymptotically optimal program searcher (1973) to find our universe's code.

On page 469 we are told that the simplest program for the data is the most probable one. No mention of the very science based on this ancient principle: Solomonoff's inductive inference theory (1960-1978); recent optimality results by Merhav & Feder & Hutter. Following Schmidhuber's "algorithmic theories of everything" (2000), short world-explaining programs are necessarily more likely, provided the world is sampled from a limit-computable prior distribution. Compare Li & Vitanyi's excellent 1997 textbook on Kolmogorov complexity.

On page 628 ff we find a lot of words on human thinking and short programs. As if this was novel! Wolfram seems totally unaware of Hutter's optimal universal rational agents (2001) based on simple programs a la Solomonoff & Kolmogorov & Levin & Chaitin.

Wolfram suggests his simple programs will contribute to fine arts (page 11), neither mentioning existing, widely used, very short, fractal-based programs for computing realistic images of mountains and plants, nor the only existing art form explicitly based on simple programs: Schmidhuber's low-complexity art.

Wolfram talks a lot about reversible CAs but little about Edward Fredkin & Tom Toffoli who pioneered this field. He ignores Wheeler's "it from bit," Tegmark & Greenspan & Petrov & Marchal's papers, Moravec & Kurzweil's somewhat related books, and Greg Egan's fun SF on CA-based universes (Permutation City, 1995).

When the book came out some non-expert journalists hyped it without knowing its contents. Then cognoscenti had a look at it and recognized it as a rehash of old ideas, plus pretty pictures. And the reviews got worse and worse. As far as I can judge, positive reviews were written only by people without basic CS education and little knowledge of CS history. Some biologists and even a few physicists initially were impressed because to them it really seemed new. Maybe Wolfram's switch from physics to CS explains why he believes his thoughts are radical, not just reinventions of the wheel.

But he does know Goedel and Zuse and Turing. He must see that his own work is minor in comparison. Why does he desparately try to convince us otherwise? When I read Wolfram's first praise of the originality of his own ideas I just had to laugh. The tenth time was annoying. The hundredth time was boring. And that was my final feeling when I laid down this extremely repetitive book:exhaustion and boredom. In hindsight I know I could have saved my time. But at least I can warn others.

The vanity outweighs the science
There are only 2 salient points about this book;

1. There is no "new kind of science" in the book, but rather a collection of very interesting interactions between different simple automata and their limited environments. The book could easily have been the size of an article in Scientific American (for example) and lost none of the essential meaning.

2. The author is *unbelievably* proud of his achievement. This will put any true scientist off. It's not fun to read, having to skip the pages and endless pages of self-congratulatory nonsense to find the occasional nugget of scientific analysis. Almost every paragraph talks about how long he has been doing it (who cares?), how radically he has changed the focus of other sciences (yet to be demonstrated) or how clever he is (also uncertain).

The pictures are nice, and I'm sure many a graduate degree will be pursuing what I'm sure will be fertile ground in this area, but I shall not soon forget the ordeal of trudging through his ego to get there.

It does look impressive on a bookshelf, but I'm hoping none of my guests have actually read it.

Pretty pictures, dull prose
As someone with a scientific background but no specific knowledge of the subject of this book, I was not really convinced that it presented any new ideas that I had not come across (at least hinted at) in other popular science books. However, that is a difficult conclusion to reach, because Wolfram's undisciplined and badly structured prose style compares extremely poorly to most other popular science writers, and I confess to skipping large chunks. I'm sure a more talented communicator could have given a pithy and entertaining exposition of the main ideas in this book in 50-100 pages.

An interesting quote from the Institute of Physics review of the book: "Those who are familiar with the field will find it alarming to see page after page of results - bearing a striking similarity to previously published work - respresented as Wolfram's personal scientific revelation." The lack of acknowledgement of others is indeed extremely annoying.

I would not recommend that anyone shells out for this book if they can borrow it or get a cheap second hand copy (no, I'm not trying to flog mine on Amazon!).