Stephen Wolfram has mastered the art of being intellectually provocative and extremely annoying at the same time. He’s talking about very cool stuff here, but I’m put off by the excessive hype — apparently he wants to model the fundamental properties of the entire universe in some code in the computer, and while I sympathize with the idea that maybe the theory of everything really will lead to something both fundamental and simple, I’m not convinced that it will just pop out of a program that is sufficiently synthetic.
Perhaps it would be more persuasive if he said something more specific than waving a hand at a squiggly diagram of a 3-dimensional set of looping lines on the computer screen and announcing that that there was our universe.
Wolfram is a bad case of hammer/nail syndrome. Because of fiddling around with Mathematica, he discovered some interesting properties of cellular automata, and then proceeded to think they explained the entire universe.
He’s discovered the same route as the IDiots to getting really good answers every time — dry-lab it.
Now just run around giving talks about this revolutionary science, and you just need to tell everyone the answer.
Damn idiots with their laboratories and “observations,” they just make countertops messy and life complicated.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
I agree with PZ! I once attended one of Wolfram’s talks on his ‘new kind of science’at MIT, and the whole thing was hand-waving and BS.
I especially remember him declaring that the ability to predict phenomena was not important to science and pitching some $500 conference which would make everything clear. What an annoying guy.
“I am my own reality check.” — Stephen Wolfram
#2 :1,$s/IDiots/agwdeniers/agwproponants/g
sweeping generalization that was a little too sweeping
BrianX@1: “Because of fiddling around with Mathematica, he discovered some interesting properties of cellular automata, and then proceeded to think they explained the entire universe.”
and then he wrote a book about it and implied that he had thought it all up himself and ignored everyone else who had worked in the field for years …
Years later I still remember what Steven Weinberg had to say when he reviewed Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science:
To be fair he does add: “In the case of Wolfram’s book, that would be a mistake. Wolfram is smart….I don’t think that his book comes close to meeting his goals or justifying his claims, but if it is a failure it is an interesting one.”
You know, the whole “modeling the universe” thing is what got me into computer science in the first place. I thought his whole talk was pretty interesting, even though the last half was … a little crazy.
Also, it struck me particularly because lately I’ve had a bizarre notion that our whole universe is the result of a giant version Conway’s game of life
Around 1987 I attended a grad class Wolfram was offering at UIUC on nonlinear or complex systems–something like that. For unimportant reasons I was a somewhat familiar face. After the class he came up to me and asked: “How was it, because this is the first class…”
Now complete his sentence–mentally– the first grad class he ever taught? That is what I expected.
No– the way he finished his sentence was: “this is the first class I’ve ever been in.”
He was ~30, a full professor at an R1 institution, had his own building in the heart of UIUC’s campus– and this was the first class he was ever in (so he said.)
I have a lot more Wolfram stories from my days at Illinois. He is a outlier, to say the least.
@Feynmaniac
Yeah, I couldn’t make it through A New Kind of Science. That book really needed some substantial editing… what Wolfram was talking about was generally interesting, except it was continuously riddled with passages of Wolfram going on and on about how interesting and profound it was. After reading for the twentieth or so time about just how singularly clever Wolfram was for noticing how cool cellular automata are I had to give up.
Say what you will, WolframAlpha is friggin’ useful.
BrianX said it also at #1… but yeah, this really sounds like something along the lines of “assuming the fundamental properties of the universe are like a nail, I’ve got a wonderful hammer”…
Ok… but what if they’re like a screw?
I read “A New Kind of Science”, and whilst I thought it was cool in places, I guess I didn’t get it all because I really didn’t think the hype in (and around) it was warranted. But then I’m a synthetic chemist, not a physicist/computer scientist. Although, I seem to agree with Steven Weinberg, which can’t be a bad thing all the time! ;-)
I will agree with others that WolframAlpha and Mathematica are awesomely useful though, and Wolfram has contributed a serious and significant body of work to the scientific community. Therefore, for me, Wolfram goes into the same box as Aubrey De Grey: brilliant, challenging, potentially doing something game changingly wonderful, utterly incapable of being boring or meaningully dismissed, but worth ignoring when he gets onto the “grant-grasping hype/booster” speechifying.
Louis
I watched the video and I didn’t get that “he wants to model the fundamental properties of the entire universe in some code in the computer” but rather he is postulating that based on the observation that simple computational rules produce complex outputs, that maybe the universe itself is fundamentally based on simple rules that result in all of the complex phenomena that we observe.
@SamB #12 marginally, couldnt determine what I was after and uses google as an outside search engine instead of a compilation
Get a bigger hammer.
We could call his book “A New Baramin of Science”
But… if you can allow yourself to get beyond his irritating writing style and self-aggrandizement, he has teased out/reported on a lot of interesting stuff about CAs.
The simplicity of certain of the rulesets yielding behavior complex enough to provably be able to concoct a Turing machine (e.g. even simpler than Conway’s Life) is pretty remarkable.
Plus, (again, if you motor through his writing style) his description of how he organized and typeset the book is relatively inspiring. He’s sort of like the antithesis of Douglas Hofstadter, each occupying a pole of irritating writing style but fascinating subject matter.
But who would Wolfram trust to edit his self-published book? Not anyone who would have the independence to make savage cuts, I suspect.
If they ever make a film of Wolfram’s life, I hope Steve Martin is available.
I think you are all being a bit too hard on the man.
He doesn’t that he’s certain to suceed only that he hopes he does and he would think it a shame to not even try.
Does that really sound so unreaasonable?
Admittedly he is a bit annoying in his presentation. If you dislike him on that basis you may take solace that those same traits probably delayed the loss of viriginity for several years. So he’s probably already suffered enough for them.
I think you are all being a bit too hard on the man.
He doesn’t state that he’s certain to suceed only that he think the attempt is worthwhile and that the payoff is potentialy huge.
Does that really sound so unreasonable?
Admittedly he is a bit annoying in his presentation. If you dislike him on that basis you may take solace that those same traits probably delayed the loss of viriginity for several years. So he’s probably already suffered enough for them.
I tried using Wolfram Alpha to answer real life quantitative questions and had a hard time finding something I wanted to know it knew anything about. Wolfram Tones could be used as an audio torture device. These things are not yet worthy of the hype.
I haven’t tried to digest this, but if you want to try to see his detailed arguments, he has now posted it free online – http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html
There are others who share similar theories to Wolfram.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fredkin – “Pancomputationalists believe that biology reduces to chemistry reduces to physics reduces to computation of information.”
I was first exposed to Fredkin in Wright’s “Three Scientists and Their Gods”. Like “A New Kind of Science”, it seemed interesting, but out there. When Wolfram published his tome, I was curious because of the things I remembered about Fredkin. So, Wolfram isn’t alone in this thinking. That doesn’t make him right, but others may have stumbled onto similar approaches.
Rule 110 is pretty interesting. It’s very simple but generates quite a complex image.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110
Strictly speaking, I have no problem with the idea that we might be able to “model”, on a simplistic scale, the universe, the same way we model a lot of things, including human behavior in fires, and where you place exits, etc. The problem is, until/unless you have a “complete” model, all you have is a statistically useful one, and even then, something like a universe is likely to require almost as much complexity as the universe itself, just to model full scale. But, the fundamental flaw in the whole idea is simply that ***no one*** models human behavior in fires, how people drive in cities, etc., with the idea of “figuring it all out”, ***unless*** its actually possible to get predictive results from it. That is the whole bloody point.
This reminds me of a lot of the people currently now trying to model the cell “in silico”. I don’t think its necessarily bad to try, but given how little we know about the structure and interaction of most proteins, it seems a little silly to try designing drugs with a model when you don’t necessarily know if it represents reality. Trying to model the universe is a noble endeavor, but is it really to the point were we should be excited about it?
I’m reminded of a mathematician I knew slightly from the 90’s. He was a smart guy who got his Ph.D at an Ivy from a brilliant analyst, but he was no genius—except in his own mind.
He did some good work, but the way he wrote about the originality of his work in his job letters was almost delusional. He left math and went into finance a few years ago. I’m not sure if that’s because he couldn’t get a job or because math wasn’t good enough for him.
I also think Wolfram compares with Marylin Vos Savant. Obviously Wolfram is far more educated and brilliant, but what happened to him is the same thing that happened to her: he cut himself off from criticism, become a crackpot in the process. Peer review and peer contact is so important.
Given that sufficiently complicated cellular automata are universal computers, equivalent to Turing Machines, of course you can model the universe in them. That certainly doesn’t mean that the universe IS a cellular automaton, nor that the rules are sufficiently simple that they would produce a more useful approximation than, say, differential equations.
And I really want to add “That’s my wife!” to your heading. Just saying.
I could swear at several points, i heard tittering, people laughing at Mr. WolframAlpha– I mean, Wolfram. Especially when he casually referred to “a new kind of science.”
At the end of his “astonishing” lecture, did anything find it ridiculous that the moderator asked Wolfram to relate his work to string theory??
Wolfram is a shit. A clever shit, but a shit. It wasn’t actually him, but Matthew Cook (Cook, M., 2004, “Universality in elementary cellular automata”, Complex Systems 15(1):1-40) who proved the computational universality of rule 110. Cook was working for Wolfram at the time, and Wolfram prevented him from publishing for 10 years, so the finding could make its first public appearance in A New Kind of Science where he takes most of the credit. I met Cook at a Santa Fe Institute workshop on CA in 1998, and heard the story from him. Anyone who works with Wolfram seems to end up either suing or being sued by him.
He also massively overrates the importance of computational universality, which is actually a pretty low hurdle for computational systems: it tells you nothing about the dynamic properties of systems such as CA, e.g. whether they would generate complex structures and processes from a simple initial position.
Now, I couldn’t live without Mathematica, so props are due Stephen Wolfram.
It’s just unfortunate that none of us can praise him as well as he figures he ought to be praised.
After eight years, the very best commentary on Wolfram remains Cosma Shalizi’s classic A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity.
Wolfram is interesting; however, what he’s fiddling with is pure mathematics. You can describe the universe using mathematics; the catch is, you can describe anything using pure mathematics, so you have to figure out how to decide which description corresponds to the universe, and how.
A New Kind of Science is worth reading, albeit not worth taking as an incredible revelation.
Knockgoats
That’s not news. My wife heard him speak at NIST, and he pulled the same stunt, claiming credit for work that wasn’t his. Unfortunately for him, some of the people whose work he was claiming were present in the audience.
He published a paper in Reviews of Modern Physics in 1983 on the statistical mechanics of CA. It didn’t seem to be very deep, and I read it several times, trying to figure out if I was missing something profound. I eventually concluded that there wasn’t anything profound to miss.
He reminds me of Kurzweil in that I am interested in what he has to say, but I take it with a grain of salt and usually scale back his claims a few orders of magnitude.
“Stephen Wolfram has mastered the art of being intellectually provocative and extremely annoying at the same time.”
I take it this is an expert testimonial?
Wolfram always talks about the same thing (and about how wonderful he is); I just ignore him. I find his blather as intellectual as M. Shermer’s libertarian rants. It’s just bullshit dressed up with nice graphics.
I tried the Wolfram Alpha with some fun questions, but the only one I got an answer for was the average size of the male genitalia.
Still, interesting idea.
Isn’t wolfram what the Germans call tungsten?
Wolfram must admire this guy:
….psychohistory?!!?!?!
Wolfram is just a wealthier Brian Josephson.
I think that he will be “successful” albeit with a caveat. He will find one rule initially that is extremely near our universe … and then many, many others which are similar and only fine measurements to discern which is “really” ours.
Then their will be arguments that by “parsimony” the simplest of them must be “right” … but shortly thereafter some mathematician will demonstrate that by other computational models like WA, different rules will be “simpler” including previously much more complex candidate universe rules. And shortly thereafter another will announce a mathematical discovery that demonstrates that it is fundamentally unknowable which “rules” apply to the universe until that universe reaches maximal entropy.
— TWZ
redmjoel: Only if the universe is computable …
Touche, phil (can I call you Phil?). You do have a point that I hadn’t considered. A model must be computable. The thing modeled may not be. And because of Heisenberg the universe may very well not be computable in all its details.
Iono. I’ve been largely disappointed when I tried it.
It did do annuities and mortgages fairly intuitively, but it has bugger all support for chemistry.
Well, that’s almost trivially true. The point is that “complex” systems (not chaotic or steady-state, according to Wolfram’s classification system — which, so far as I know, might be the most useful thing to come out of his research in the 80s) are what are interesting. Non-equilibrium thermodynamics is good stuff; trying to tease that out is important.
In my humble opinion, Wolfram’s classification scheme is his most important work; he was scooped (no matter his attributions and continued assertions to the contrary) in virtually everything else
Well most of the talk is about Wolfram Alpha, which is already a cool piece of technology with a lot of future potential.
But yea… I thought it was funny how the audience just laughed at him when he said he needed to invent a new science.
Har. De. Har. Har.
Speaking as a physicist, I suspect Wolfram’s amazement that interaction of simple systems accoring to simple rules can lead to complex behavior may stem from the fact that he also is of similar bent. This is not news to an ecologist trying to model whether a change in an ecosystem will favor or work against a predator in that ecosystem.
Even in physics, competing effects can give rise to some extremely rich behavior. To call this a “new science” is at best naive and possibly arrogant. Yes, there’s gold to mine in the complexity vein. There’s also a lot of woo and a lot of crap. The trick is and always will be separating them.
Keith Laumer, the sci-fi writer, would have loved that talk. I remember that at the end of one of his time-traveling-escapade novels he effectively recreated reality with a supercomputer and then proceeded to live as though it were the real thing, since there was virtually no difference.
It’s interesting that I see the neat little interactive global location graph down below at the bottom of the page for the first time on this particular thread. It’s kinda like it’s … replicating the universe!
Douglas Adams already did this, the answer is 42.
It reminds me of Dennett warning us of “greedy reductionism”, except here…the universe is a simulation. So what? It doesn’t tell us anything new. Wolfram must be out of his mind.
As far as computer science is concerned, there are some problems that are just impossible to solve, given the grandular nature of the universe. There are even open problems dealing with computer complexity classes, in particular does NP=P? [However, I’m not a computer scientist…]
A question I would like to ask Wolfram is:
“How do you know that the best way of understanding the universe is to do a computer simulation?” Never mind the annoying cosmologists, astronomers, synthetic organic chemists, biologists, etc. of course!
P.S: I liked the joke of Wolfram = Tungsten.
And that isn’t even viable.
Lawrence Gray, Notices of the AMS 50, 2 (February 2003): 200–211.
RE #23:
“Pancomputationalists believe that biology reduces to chemistry reduces to physics reduces to computation of information.” -Fredkin
Max Tegmark published a detailed analytical defense of this idea a few years ago, which he calls the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH): “Our external physical reality is a mathematical structure.” http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646
Computational irreducibility IS interesting and celluar automata is probably the simplest way to demonstrate it.
Nature is full of parallel phenomena that are metaphors of each other. Similar because they are governed by similar rules. However, cellular automata-phenomena arise when close proximity is a requirement for interaction or when the interacting elements may block each other. This is seen in biology, but it is very different from the physical forces we see that work at a distance.
As physical metaphors go, if anything seems to be the primal element of our universe it is wave phenomena which crop up practically everywhere, while it’s not impossible to get waves from cellular automata, a few tricks are required. It is no longer a very simple model.
I think Wolfram has been blinded by the perhaps naïve realization that computers can compute almost anything and that turing completeness is a low hanging fruit. That does not mean that it is the fundament of reality.
But hey, it’s his money.
@jre
Thanks for posting the link to that review, this biologist found it fascinating (it helps being married to a graduate in maths and compsci). The review is correct about developmental biology, there was great hope for Turing morphogens, especially when Cheryll Tickle demonstrated Retinoic Acid could repattern limbs in embryos. Except it turned out it didn’t act as a field morphogen, but a localised inducer.
Just after I got my PhD I very nearly made the mistake of wasting time with my wife trying to build a computer model of limb formation and patterning that, based on understandings and bets on what would be right at the time, would have been dead wrong and not at all valuable.
How you do make a limb is complex, ad hoc, and remarkably robust and reliable. You can even perturb it reliably (within particular parameters). We still don’t, nearly 20 years after my thoughts, know enough to model the whole thing but we can do some parts (like how the AER directs elongation).
I have lived in interesting times and greatly enjoyed the fact. The truth has indeed been much queerer than I can know.
One thing that biological systems demonstrate in spades though is historical contingency, you could not run the tape again and get the same results. A lot of the niches would be there and filled, but by different beings, as we see in various places on the earth. This historical contingency means you cannot model the life in the universe without having modelled the exact historical contingencies, for each and every individual.
#51:
I was thinking of the SF writer Greg Egan, who has used the CA-as-universe idea (notably in Permutation City).
By about half way in, I was sure he needed to go for a piss.
“I could go on at great length, but actually I really need to get offstage right now.”
Must give this Alpha thing a try. How well does it do at palaeontology?
I’ve heard Fredkin talk about his pancomputationalism (on the radio, getting on for 20 years ago now) and he didn’t seem to see a problem in that a computation requires a physical substrate. Isn’t it obviously more parsimonious to say that the universe exists and does computation, than that it is somehow a computation running on something else (which is what he seemed to think)? We can reject the ontological argument for a programmer, just as for a creator. But I haven’t read his stuff, maybe I misunderestimated.
Oh, and how is ‘Wolfram = Tungsten’ a joke? It’s a dictionary entry.
Blake Stacey, #55:
Thanks for that review. I’ve read it many times (usually when upset with some design flaw in Mathematica), and totally forgot any application of his classification scheme to his CAs. I was actually remembering them as applied to other systems showing evidence of stability, chaos, complexity, etc. The reason I thought it was important is that it was the first such scheme to emphasize the fact that chaos can be *boring* by being *too chaotic*, compared to “complex” systems.
My reading of the scheme, of course, was heavily tinted by some experts in the field, who probably used it as a handy talk-to-the-layman illustration, while glossing over its problems.
Have any of you even read his book? I thought it was one of the most profound and amazing science books I have ever read. I think he’s really on to something.
That’s certainly possible (it would probably happen to me), but I suspect it has more to do with the 18-minute time limit of TED talks.
I read the whole thing. I seem to have a gift of being able to ignore irritating writing styles (I can handle Hofstadter and Margulis as well). The subject matter is fascinating, and Wolfram has clearly reamed out a bunch of interesting stuff about CAs.
Profound? Amazing? On to something? I’d have to see applications and critical reviews of the field to judge whether those descriptions were fit.
It’s a space station!
Three-dimensional looping lines? The entire universe is that screensaver from Windows 3.1?