Via Langreiter.com, Wired: The Man Who Cracked The Code to Everything ....
[Wolfram] goes on to explain that by applying a single key observation - that the most complicated behavior imaginable arises from very simple rules - one can view and understand the universe with previously unattainable clarity and insight. The idea of complexity arising from simple rules - and that the universe can best be understood by way of the computation it requires to grind out results from those rules - is at the center of the book.
The article really whet my appetite for his book, which is scheduled to get to me tomorrow. 
The book begins this way:
"Three centuries ago science was transformed by the dramatic new idea that rules based on mathematical equations could be used to describe the natural world. My purpose in this book is to initiate another such transformation, and to introduce a new kind of science that is based on the much more general types of rules that can be embodied in simple computer programs."
I just have to quote more of the article:
To list only a few examples: Wolfram finds an exception to the second law of thermodynamics; conjectures why extraterrestrials might be communicating with us in messages we can't perceive; explains seeming randomness in financial markets; defines randomness; elaborates on why the "apparent freedom of human will" is so convincing; reconstructs the foundations of mathematics; devises a new way to perform encryption; insists that Darwinian natural selection is an overrated component in evolution; and, oh, theorizes that there's a "definite ultimate model for the universe." What might this be? The mother of all rules; a single, simple "ultimate rule" that computes everything from quantum physics to reality television.
The climax of the book is the principle of computational equivalence, which may as well be called "Wolfram's law." After hundreds of pages of laying groundwork, presenting case after case of visual examples where simple rules generate counterintuitively complex results, Wolfram concludes that this phenomenon is overwhelmingly commonplace - it's at the base of everything from morphology to traffic jams. Then he goes further, stating that once a system achieves a certain, easily attainable degree of complexity, it's reached the point of maximum complexity, as measured by the computation required to crank out the end result. Everything at that level of complexity - and that means almost everything you can think of, from human thought to rain hitting pavement - is exactly as complex as anything else.
Thursday, May 16, 2002
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