Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Thanks for pointing these out, David. I wish I'd come across these two articles within a more reasonable period of reading A New Kind of Science. Kurzweil's right that Wolfram is a bit simplistic; his work doesn't fully consider the complexity of a system that is two to eleven dimensions deep (if string theory holds up). On the other hand, Wolfram's work explains many other natural results that would be nearly impossible to model using traditional linear methods. ANKS really represents a paradigm shift in processing, away from analog/linear to a digital/non-linear (textual to graphical?) analysis of our universe. It's a move from two-dimensions to three-dimensions, in the right direction towards the expansion of our understanding -- but it's still not fourth-dimensional thinking and beyond which lay ahead. But then as Wolfram points out frequently, some things are computationally irreducible. By the time we solve whether Wolfram's work is enough, we'll have already evolved to yet another new kind of science.