Has anyone here read Stephen Wolfram's, "A New Kind of Science?" Is it any good?
Name:
York2005-05-25 5:40
I got it for free from a friend who was getting rid of books, and I haven't done any more than leaf through it. There's a lot of graphs and reference to 'cellular automata', and I haven't really studied any of it, but the consensus seems to be that it's a vanity piece which extends older ideas on Computer Science. Amazon seems to have some actually helpful reviews on it. If you're just looking to buy it for random cool stuff to leaf through, it's not worth it.
Name:
Anonymous2005-05-31 7:13
>>2
Just Google for Cellular Automata, Conway's Game of Life is a good example. It's not new at all, it's a very simple, interesting computing model (although I must admit it's more interesting than useful).
Name:
Anonymous2008-10-31 14:55
>>2
More or less, yeah. I found it sitting in my local crap-ass library. Some thousand pages filled with graphs and descriptions. The only worthwhile pages are the first couple, and even then you get the feeling Stephen Wolfram is just generalizing the whole of CS, which he basically is.