BOOK REVIEW on A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram Wolfram
نویسنده
چکیده
“Somebody says, ‘You know, you people always say that space is continuous. How do you know when you get to a small enough dimension that there really are enough points in between, that it isn’t just a lot of dots separated by little distances?’ Or they say, ‘You know those quantum mechanical amplitudes you told me about, they’re so complicated and absurd, what makes you think those are right? Maybe they aren’t right.’ Such remarks are obvious and are perfectly clear to anybody who is working on this problem. It does not do any good to point this out.” —Richard Feynman [1, p.161]
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A Reclusive Kind of Science Review of A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram Review
Introduction If someone had announced that a brilliant, independent-minded scientist had sequestered himself for more than a decade, seldom visiting with colleagues or attending professional meetings, all the time working alone on a “big” project, most of us could sketch out the probable outcome. Indeed, Wolfram’s long-awaited tome on cellular automata exhibits characteristics one might expect:...
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Early in the 1980s Stephen Wolfram began to work in earnest upon cellular automata. These are a class of computer model which may be visualized as a set of memory locations, each containing one bit. These bits are updated in a succession of time steps. In each step, the new value of each bit depends upon the values of neighboring bits. Wolfram particularly studied the class of automata in which...
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