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Stephen Wolfram, ANKOS

gmol

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Feb 23, 2002
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I just heard him give a lecture at UCSD...
I ripped this from a blog entry, though I'd post it here if anyone was interested in disucssing...:

Dear Dr. Wolfram,
I want to believe.

I love reading about neat little programs which generate beautiful patterns (which appear similar to those found in nature), and can be characterized by the strangest numbers....it's magic, it really is. The fact that you've spent so much time classifying various patterns and have shown decribed aspects of fluid dynamics with a totally novel approach is really something. You are probably a more successful scientist than I will ever be. Not to mention that you wrote this great program Mathematica, which I just love.

But I humbly suspect that you are allieving your self discontent of joining the rest of us into an inevitable slow fade into history from an aNobel life. Writing a really big book with a really BIG title, filled with non-assertions backed up by opinions; all of these are signs of the fine art of crackpottery.

I want to believe.

Now I've read through a good chunk of it (a friend's copy); and I don't know if I should actually read it cover to cover; because it's is not obvious that I will learn anything. I read normal science textbooks so that I can eventually synthesize molecules, learn to characterize them and understand what sorts of practical purposes or knowledge they will offer. I am not convinced that your underlying princple of explaing the universe with simple programs (not at all concisely stated in the book) is at all useful or even insightful; as you seem to suggest. I don't want to spend time reading a big book, when I think the author is trying to bamboozle me.

I want to believe.

I want to believe that there is some magical, beautiful simple way of understanding things that my feeble little brain takes a lot of time to digest. The unfolded protein response pathway, development, crystal formation, the theory of everything (look it up in the index of your book in case you need to be reminded). Science just seems to be tough.

I ask you Dr, Wolfram to prove your claims. Demonstrate one insightful example of a "simple program" which could directly aid me to generate things like:

-An abiotic complex chemical system
-Characterization of cancer, and potential therapies
-A novel analytical chemical instrument
-Prediction of a real hitherto unknown fundamental biological pathway.
-A complete schema for biolgoical/chemical information

I have met a lot of pompus, self-promoting scientists. I would not make such a call to even the most biosterous of them; as they are not claiming to have a new kind of science...you are.

I want to believe in the people that make claims like you....sometimes though if it looks like a duck, acts like a duck and smells like a duck: it's probably a pretty smart rich guy trying to convince me that he is smarter than anyone I will ever meet.
 
Here is an intersting passage from the E-skeptic article:
Although it is clear that Wolfram is no crank, not someone skeptics would label a pseudoscientist, skeptics will notice that, despite his flawless credentials, staggering intelligence, and depth of knowledge, Wolfram possesses many attributes of a pseudoscientist: (1) he makes grandiose claims, (2) works in isolation, (3) did not go through the normal peer-review process, (4) published his own book, (5) does not adequately acknowledge his predecessors, and (6) rejects a well-established theory of at least one famous scientist.
Click to expand...
 
gmol said:
...The fact that you've spent so much time classifying various patterns and have shown decribed aspects of fluid dynamics with a totally novel approach is really something....
Click to expand...
This one I had to comment on.
Those of us in the fluid dynamics community are very aware of Steve Wolfram... as a crackpot. First of all, his ideas of using cellular-automata type ideas for the simulation of fluids are nothing new. They were toyed with by people like von Nuemann early in the history of numerical simulation of gases, and were quickly abandoned. You see, compared to other numerical methods, cellular automata suck. Innefficient, expensive (in terms of memory usage), and highly diffusive, they pale in comparison to countless other methods from the last 30 years.

I've read Wolfram's (self-published) book. I learned a lot about cellular automata I didn't know before. However, the bizaare and grandiose claims are not supported by the content, and it serves to remind mathematical physicists why he stopped publishing real papers years ago.
Its sad I guess. He's going the way of Hoyle...
 
zakur said:
Michael Shermer's E-skeptic newsletter (I received it yesterday) was on this very topic. It looks like it's been posted on Usenet, so rather than posting the entire text, here's a link:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...401f8a.0302062325.194d0c8d@posting.google.com
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From that article:
For hundreds of years,
scientists have successfully used mathematical equations that show how various entities are connected. For instance, Newton's equation, F=ma, shows us how force (F) is related to mass (m) and acceleration (a). The problem with this approach is that equations fail to describe complex phenomena we see all around us, such as the turbulence of boiling water or the changing weather.
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Bullsh!t. Weather/turbulence are described perfectly well by the essentially Newtonian equations that are normally taken to govern them (i.e. Euler's equations and the Navier-Stokes equation). In principal, they contain all the information you need to describe how the flud will act. Where these eqns fail is in yielding actual solutions for the full behaviour of the fluid on all scales. But this is not a fault of Newtonian mechanics, or our way of 'thinking' about science, but a result of our lack of an efficient numerical method for simulating these equations. And, as I mentioned above, cellular automata flunk the test as a good numerical method for fluids.
 
Here's a review my brother, a math professor at UW Seattle, sent me. He gave me the book as a xmas gift, but has since apologized for giving such a large cumbersome doorstop. "A rock with a nice mandelbrot set on it would have been better" is, I believe, what he said.

http://www.ams.org/bull/2003-40-01/S0273-0979-02-00970-9/S0273-0979-02-00970-9.pdf

Here's another:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html?flash=1
"His reviews are interesting, but in fact they take Wolfram too seriously" was Jim's comment. I'll send him a link to the comments from Shermer's newsletter.

The next question is "so what?" and that's where my concern comes from. He's now got to come up with an answer to "so what? and my bet is, since his 1280 page tome is not based upon either good math or good physics, the answer will be some kind of non-testable/magical implication/revelation, and whatever else it does it'll divert resources to more new-age crap.



I think it is best described with Pauli's phrase "it's not even wrong".
 
As a computer scientist who has done research on cellular automata I was excited when I heard about Wolfram’s book. When I read it, though, I became less enthused. He doesn’t really say much but he takes his time doing so. I didn’t see any real useful applications for cellular automata listed in the book. Sure, there are lots of places where he says “and there are useful applications for this” but he doesn’t actually say what they are.

As a fan of CA in general I enjoyed the book. I like the idea of CA systems in and of themselves; I think they’re fun to fool around with and can produce some pretty pictures. I’ve also got some ideas for using them to generate random enviroments for games. But in terms of simulating real world systems I don’t see any applicability. Even if the universe really is generated through a program with simple rules, until we figure out what they are the concept won’t be of much use.
 
I am fascinated by the idea, but I'm a little confused; what do the black and white squares correspond to in real life??
 
Tai , the reference to automata and some of the other comments refer obliquely to chaotic behavior in systems. The idea is that small changes can produce large unpredictable behavior, in weather, fluids, smoke from a cigarette, all kinds of things. The Butterfly effect ( which has existed for decades before the movie BTW.
The setting is you have a basic simple model with very simple rules, set it loose and see what happens. What emerges is very complex unpredictable behavior that seems at times to be cohesive and at other times to be chatioc.


The random uncertainty along a hurricanes path is an real life example. The meteorologist will show you a chart of the predicted path of the storm but as time moves on in his map there is a big cone of predicted behavior that widens as time proceeds where probabilities drop to <50% in just a few days. . This from some of the best people in the world at what they do , With the aid of supercomputers!

Vorticity contends ( correctly) that the behavior of fluids is an understood phenomenon, that for a closed system with no ( or just minimal ) variation over time, however we could not predict where and when and how big a bubble will be on the surface of the boiling water, before the fact. The behavior can be explained by accepted rules AFTER the fact , but we cannot predict it with any accuracy.
 
TillEulenspiegel said:
Vorticity contends ( correctly) that the behavior of fluids is an understood phenomenon,
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Not quite (but close). If I contended that, I'd be wrong. I meant that the rules that govern fluid behaviour are known. The problem is that the nature of their nonlinearity makes them extremely difficult to solve numerically (or analytically in the vast majority of cases).

This was meant to contrast with Wolfram's suggestion that the difficulty of modelling fluids comes not from any inherent complexity of the fluids themselves, but from the fact that we're thinking them incorrectly. The thing is, he's just plain wrong. His own way of "thinking" about fluids (cellular automata) can be shown to model fluids extremely poorly, much worse than standard methods. CA methods for molecular modelling of liquids (which is my field) were abandoned early in the history of computing as inefficient and highly diffusive. This was years before Wolfram was even born.

Steve Wolfram is the crackpot of the fluid dynamics community.

that for a closed system with no ( or just minimal ) variation over time, however we could not predict where and when and how big a bubble will be on the surface of the boiling water, before the fact. The behavior can be explained by accepted rules AFTER the fact , but we cannot predict it with any accuracy.
Click to expand...
Well, we'd be able to predict it with some accuracy, just not a very good accuracy. Bubble formation and transport is a hot topic right now in fluid dynamics, so a little bit more is know now than, say, 10 years ago. I'd guess that all of the supercomputers in the world working together for a month would be able to model a typical pot of boiling water pretty accurately. That's not much, but it's a heck of a lot better than what we could say a few years ago.
 
This is hand's down the best review of ANKOS I've seen.

Divine Secrets Of the Ya-Ya Universe

Published by "Skeptic" magazine no less!

I too saw Wolfram at UCSD and got to talk to him and some of his peers afterwards. I found him as an affable fellow, he was very polite and spent a signigant amount of time discussing math with a young wiz that attended the lecture. He did not come off as a crank.

That said, I think he has fallen victim to his own BS to some extent. He's worked in isolation for so long, surrounded only by his employees (whom aren't about to criticize his work).

The book screams for an editor, I gave up trying to read it after I noticed he was making the same points over and over again. He really should have made it a multi-volume set. Perhaps one small introductary book describing the basic theory and then more detailed volumes applying it to various disciplines.

Whether it's actually a "New Kind of Science" or not, I remain doubtful. Ultimately his work fails the dogfood test, if it really was such a breakthrough then someone, somewhere, should be doing something novel with it. This might change at some point (perhaps when computers have petabytes of ram and operate at a tetrahertz), but for now more conventional models will rule.
 
Is this the Mathematica guy? I used to frequent a technical bookstore and met him when he gave a talk there (I think it was on Mathematica, I didn't stay). His background (Northwestern, right?) seems solid, and the product is pretty well regarded. Dagnabbit, now I have to look at the book, which is available online:

http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/

Homer beer without no function good.
 
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