I love NKS and think Wolfram is one of the best Math and even science explainers out there. Yes, he doesn't know the meaning of the word "humility" but I honestly don't care.
He advertises NKS as some sort of revolution, but I don't care about these claims either. What I do care is the clarity of his explanations and the quality of the book overall.
Stephen Wolfram isn't my idol. But I get a ton of value listening to him nonetheless. He's a genius and a rare one who can bridge the gap with the layman.
Another criticism of this book is that it seems to give Wolfram credit for a bunch of discoveries made by a huge array of people in math, CS, and areas like complexity, game theory, artificial life and AI, etc.
Why blame the book for giving the author credit, instead of the author for giving himself credit?
Admittedly the book did take on a life of its own, and he wrote it in Mathematica and built it with his own hand rolled CI/CD pipeline (FrameMaker + Wolfram Language diagrams + MIF export/import + automated build script + alpha/beta readers + DQA/SQA).
>Another egregious weakness is biology. Wolfram displays absolutely no understanding of evolution, or what would be necessary to explain the adaptation of organisms to their environments. This is related to his peculiar views on methodology. If you want to get a rough grasp of how the leopard might get its spots, then building a CA model (or something similar) can be very illuminating. It will not tell you whether that's actually how it works. This is an important example, because there is a classic theory of biological pattern formation, or morphogenesis, first formulated by Turing in the 1950s, which lends itself very easily to modeling in CAs, and with a little fine-tuning produces things which look like animal coats, butterfly wings, etc., etc. The problem is that there is absolutely no reason to think that's how those patterns actually form; no one has identified even a single pair of Turing morphogens, despite decades of searching. [See "Update, 4 March 2012" below.] Indeed, the more the biologists unravel the actual mechanisms of morphogenesis, the more complicated and inelegant (but reliable) it looks. If, however, you think you have explained why leopards are spotted after coming up with a toy model that produces spots, it will not occur to you to ask why leopards have spots but polar bears do not, which is to say that you will simply be blind to the whole problem of biological adaptation.
The deranged Wolfram story I find most delightful is about the pains he took micromanaging the illustrations in his book, and how hard he is to work for. He required a photo of a leopard, to illustrate how its spots were similar to a reaction diffusion system. But he rejected the first leopard photo and demanded it be replaced by another, because he didn't like its facial expression.
I think it's charming how aesthetically picky he was about which cat pictures to use in his book. It's not enough for the science and mathematics behind the gigantic book to be ground breaking, revolutionary, earth shattering and astounding -- but also the leopard's smirk can't give readers the wrong impression.
>There were all sorts of unexpected challenges. I wanted an array of pictures of animals, to illustrate their range of pigmentation patterns. But so many of the pictures we could find (including ones I’d taken myself) we couldn’t use—because I considered the facial expressions of the animals just too distracting.
Speaking of Turing's "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis":
>Alan Turing was fascinated with morphogenesis, and wrote an article by the title "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis". He modeled cell growth as a reaction-diffusion systems, now known as Turing Patterns. And he was firmly against and intended to defeat the religious claptrap pseudoscience we now call "Intelligent Design". [...]
>I typed in the preface to "Morphogenesis: Collected Works of A.M. Turing", and scanned the drawing inside the front cover by Alan Turing's mother of her son watching the daisies grow:
>Von Neumann had been interested in the applications of probability theory throughout his career; his work on the foundations of quantum mechanics and his theory of games are examples. When he became interested in automata, it was natural for him to apply probability theory here also. … His "Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms from Unreliable Components" is the first work on probabilistic automata … Whenever he discussed self-reproduction, he mentioned mutations … In Section 1.1.2.1 above and Section 1.8 below he posed the problems of modeling evolutionary processes in the framework of automata theory, of quantizing natural selection, and of explaining how highly efficient, complex, powerful automata can evolve from inefficient, simple, weak automata. A complete solution to these problems would give us a probabilistic model of self-reproduction and evolution. [9]
Burks, Arthur W., ed. Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, by John von Neumann.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966. Part I, p. 99, n. 9.
I love NKS and think Wolfram is one of the best Math and even science explainers out there. Yes, he doesn't know the meaning of the word "humility" but I honestly don't care.
He advertises NKS as some sort of revolution, but I don't care about these claims either. What I do care is the clarity of his explanations and the quality of the book overall.
Stephen Wolfram isn't my idol. But I get a ton of value listening to him nonetheless. He's a genius and a rare one who can bridge the gap with the layman.
Another criticism of this book is that it seems to give Wolfram credit for a bunch of discoveries made by a huge array of people in math, CS, and areas like complexity, game theory, artificial life and AI, etc.
Why blame the book for giving the author credit, instead of the author for giving himself credit?
Admittedly the book did take on a life of its own, and he wrote it in Mathematica and built it with his own hand rolled CI/CD pipeline (FrameMaker + Wolfram Language diagrams + MIF export/import + automated build script + alpha/beta readers + DQA/SQA).
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2022/05/the-making-of-a-...
A New Kind of Necronomicron
https://horrorcultfilms.co.uk/2014/11/hcf-exclusive-intervie...
>Another egregious weakness is biology. Wolfram displays absolutely no understanding of evolution, or what would be necessary to explain the adaptation of organisms to their environments. This is related to his peculiar views on methodology. If you want to get a rough grasp of how the leopard might get its spots, then building a CA model (or something similar) can be very illuminating. It will not tell you whether that's actually how it works. This is an important example, because there is a classic theory of biological pattern formation, or morphogenesis, first formulated by Turing in the 1950s, which lends itself very easily to modeling in CAs, and with a little fine-tuning produces things which look like animal coats, butterfly wings, etc., etc. The problem is that there is absolutely no reason to think that's how those patterns actually form; no one has identified even a single pair of Turing morphogens, despite decades of searching. [See "Update, 4 March 2012" below.] Indeed, the more the biologists unravel the actual mechanisms of morphogenesis, the more complicated and inelegant (but reliable) it looks. If, however, you think you have explained why leopards are spotted after coming up with a toy model that produces spots, it will not occur to you to ask why leopards have spots but polar bears do not, which is to say that you will simply be blind to the whole problem of biological adaptation.
The deranged Wolfram story I find most delightful is about the pains he took micromanaging the illustrations in his book, and how hard he is to work for. He required a photo of a leopard, to illustrate how its spots were similar to a reaction diffusion system. But he rejected the first leopard photo and demanded it be replaced by another, because he didn't like its facial expression.
I think it's charming how aesthetically picky he was about which cat pictures to use in his book. It's not enough for the science and mathematics behind the gigantic book to be ground breaking, revolutionary, earth shattering and astounding -- but also the leopard's smirk can't give readers the wrong impression.
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2022/05/the-making-of-a-...
>There were all sorts of unexpected challenges. I wanted an array of pictures of animals, to illustrate their range of pigmentation patterns. But so many of the pictures we could find (including ones I’d taken myself) we couldn’t use—because I considered the facial expressions of the animals just too distracting.
Speaking of Turing's "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42519371
>Alan Turing was fascinated with morphogenesis, and wrote an article by the title "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis". He modeled cell growth as a reaction-diffusion systems, now known as Turing Patterns. And he was firmly against and intended to defeat the religious claptrap pseudoscience we now call "Intelligent Design". [...]
>I typed in the preface to "Morphogenesis: Collected Works of A.M. Turing", and scanned the drawing inside the front cover by Alan Turing's mother of her son watching the daisies grow:
http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/Turing/Morphogenesis.txt
http://donhopkins.com/home/AlanTuringHockeyOrWatchingTheDais...
>[...]
And note the three levels of John von Neumann's universal constructors (mechanical, mathematical, quantum):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22304084
>Von Neumann had been interested in the applications of probability theory throughout his career; his work on the foundations of quantum mechanics and his theory of games are examples. When he became interested in automata, it was natural for him to apply probability theory here also. … His "Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms from Unreliable Components" is the first work on probabilistic automata … Whenever he discussed self-reproduction, he mentioned mutations … In Section 1.1.2.1 above and Section 1.8 below he posed the problems of modeling evolutionary processes in the framework of automata theory, of quantizing natural selection, and of explaining how highly efficient, complex, powerful automata can evolve from inefficient, simple, weak automata. A complete solution to these problems would give us a probabilistic model of self-reproduction and evolution. [9]
Burks, Arthur W., ed. Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, by John von Neumann. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966. Part I, p. 99, n. 9.
https://archive.org/details/theoryofselfrepr00vonn_0/page/n9...