Book Review: 'A New Kind of Science' · HackerPapers discussions

Book Review: 'A New Kind of Science' — mentioned by qnleigh

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 19:46:47 GMT

Before people get too excited about this, note that Wolfram has been on about his own fundamental theory of everything for some time, and the wider physics community does not take it seriously. His book 'A New Kind of Science' has him taking credit for others' discoveries going back to Turing. Here are two recent critiques of this work: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-critic... https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Book Review: 'A New Kind of Science' — mentioned by nextaccountic

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 10:20:45 GMT

> megalomaniacs tend to be frauds Eeeh. Scott Aaronson review [0] and Cosma Shali's review [1] of NKS kinds of points to this direction, so he may well be a fraud. The plagiarism case regarding rule 110 (and attempts to hide this through NDA and lawsuits [2]) doesn't do him any favors, either. Indeed maybe the biggest problem of Wolfram isn't the megalomany per se, but the total unwillingness to give credit to others and cite their damn papers. Wolfram simply isn't in the business of sharing his bibliography, which is problematic for a scientist. However, the newer Wolfram Physics [3] [4]…

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Book Review: 'A New Kind of Science' — mentioned by slowmovintarget

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 10:01:19 GMT

Scott Aaronson did: [1], [2] [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0206089.pdf [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd-0COLM8oc Summary: Wolfram's model doesn't handle violations of Bell's Inequality, which has been observed in nature. Violations of Bell's Inequality require true randomness in the underlying universe. Hypergraph state machines assume an underlying mechanism that has no randomness. In other words, it functions like the kind of hidden variables theory ruled out by Bell's theorem. They haven't gotten anything like Hilbert space (quantum states) out of Wolfram's model.

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Book Review: 'A New Kind of Science' — mentioned by qnleigh

Thu, 16 Mar 2023 06:14:17 GMT

"But for computational systems... there’s my Principle of Computational Equivalence—which implies that all these systems are in a sense equivalent in the kinds of computations they can do." Am I missing this, or is he restating the Church-Turing thesis but taking credit for it himself? I hope not. But Wolfram had been accused of this sort of thing before, see e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089

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Book Review: 'A New Kind of Science' — mentioned by cma

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 04:00:31 GMT

Scott Aaronson gave some issues with it being cellular automata even with threads connecting them (search "Bell Inequality" https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0206089.pdf), so Wolfram has moved on to graph automata things due to, if I am remembering right, someone figuring out efficient approximations of determining graph isomorphisms and it making evocative pictures with some simple transform models, and also it solving the Bell's Inequality no-go problem.

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Book Review: 'A New Kind of Science' — mentioned by meroes

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 19:49:57 GMT

Unless something has changed, he is in the camp of people like t' Hooft that claim QM is really an approximation to underlying classical/deterministic/superdeterminism. And while that is possible, the trade-offs are usually far worse or harder to explain than the baggage QM brings. Or just based on an incorrect understanding of QM Here is one breakdown: https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0206089.pdf

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Book Review: 'A New Kind of Science' — mentioned by Nokinside

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 17:32:21 GMT

Wolfram's theory was already very politely but firmly shown to be wrong 20 years ago, by people who took a look into it. Scott Aaronson for example. https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089

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Book Review: 'A New Kind of Science' — mentioned by nabla9

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 07:57:57 GMT

Many other reviews were just as critical. Scott Aaronson wrote good professional critique where he just politely debunked the main points of the book. https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089

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Book Review: 'A New Kind of Science' — mentioned by eru

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 02:26:46 GMT

Oh, the problem is that Wolfram portraits his book as the ultimate breakthrough, even though at bests its an entertaining pop-sci tome. See http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089 Also funny, from the same author: > “The impact of NKS on all the areas of computer science and physics I’m familiar with has been basically zero,” he says. “As far as I can tell, the main impact is that people now sometimes use the adjective ‘Wolframian’ to describe breathtaking claims for the trivial or well-known.” [Martin] Davis offers a sunnier take: “The book has a lot of beautiful pictures.”

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Book Review: 'A New Kind of Science' — HN submission

Fri, 23 Oct 2015 20:35:48 GMT

Review of Stephen Wolfram’s Book a New Kind of Science by Scott Aaronson (2002)

1 point; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Book Review: 'A New Kind of Science' — mentioned by aphyr

Wed, 21 Aug 2013 21:07:36 GMT

Ah, here we go. Aaronson 2002 shows that Wolfram's model cannot be consistent with experimental evidence: In physics, we examine Wolfram's proposal for a deterministic model underlying quantum mechanics, with 'long-range threads' to connect entangled particles. We show that this proposal cannot be made compatible with both special relativity and Bell inequality violation. http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089

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Book Review: 'A New Kind of Science' — mentioned by knowtheory

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 03:48:53 GMT

No, you're making the assertion first, that everyone positively asserts that the universe is continuous, and second that computer scientists see algorithmic systems as being simulations of analytical systems. The first i am agnostic to (although i do like the feynman quote at the top of http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0206089v2 which was linked to above), and the second is most certainly false, as i have indicated above. The evidence in NKS to support wolfram's assertion that the universe is a simple program is circumstantial at best, and so his windmill tilting quests for the program that is…

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Book Review: 'A New Kind of Science' — mentioned by jgershen

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 02:25:27 GMT

I came across Scott Aaronson's review of NKS a few days ago and loved it: http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089. I would recommend reading that to anyone who is also looking at Wolfram's work.

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.