| ▲ | chvid 10 hours ago | ||||||||||||||||
Someone mentioned his apparently failed earlier work ANKOS. I had to look that up - it is 2002 book by Wolfram with seemingly similar ideas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science But exactly what is the problem here? Other than perhaps a very mechanical view of the universe (which he shares with many other authors) where it is hard to explain things like consciousness and other complex behaviors. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | jacquesm 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
With Wolfram it is usually the grandstanding and taking credit for other people's work. Inventing new words for old things is part and parcel of that. He has a lot in common with Schmidhuber, both are arguably very smart people but the fact that other people can be just as smart doesn't seem to fit their worldview. | |||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | abetusk 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||
Wolfram has failed to live up to his promise of providing tools to make progress on fundamental questions of science. From my understanding, there are two ideas that Wolfram has championed: Rule 110 is Turing machine equivalent (TME) and the principle of computational equivalence (PCE). Rule 110 was shown to be TME by Cook (hired by Wolfram) [0] and was used by Wolfram as, in my opinion, empirical evidence to support the claim that Turing machine equivalence is the norm, not the exception (PCE). At the time of writing of ANKOS, there was a popular idea that "complexity happens at the edge of chaos". PCE pushes back against that, effectively saying the opposite, that you need a conspiracy to prevent Turning machine equivalence. I don't want to overstate the idea but, in my opinion, PCE is important and provides some, potentially deep, insight. But, as far as I can tell, it stops there. What results has Wolfram proved, or paid others to prove? What physical phenomena has Wolfram explained? Entanglement still remains a mystery, the MOND vs. dark matter rages on, others have made progress on busy beaver, topology, Turing machine lower bounds and relations between run-time and space, etc. etc. The world of physics, computer science, mathematics, chemistry, biology, and most of the others, continues on using classical, and newly developed tools independent of Wolfram, that have absolutely nothing to do with cellular automata. Wolfram is building a "new kind of science" tool but has failed to provide any use cases of when the tool would actually help advance science. | |||||||||||||||||