If you like game of life you gonna love this video about backwards game of life: https://youtube.com/watch?v=g8pjrVbdafY
Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life
31–40 of 66 posts
Re: Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Computation irreducibility"[0] is Mr. Wolfram's word for it and I believe it has some relationship to his CA physics, but I won't pretend I understand. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_irreducibility
Yes. He relates an interpretation/definition of the second law of thermodynamics- the increasing entropy thing- to his irreducibility. And builds a computational theory about the role and importance of the physics "observer" in these analyses. Computational irreducibility is basically a statement both about the intrinsic requirement for computation to arrive at the future, and also about the computational capability…
> I am a computational person, not a scientist, and I think science people find him to be speaking total garbage. That seems a correct assessment to me. His model of the world from physics perspective seems wrong.
I don't think it's that he is speaking garbage, he is basically talking about digital physics which is a real theory being considered and researched, not pseudoscience.
But he doesn't work with the scientific community at all, he just writes his long essays and uses his own terms and ignores anyone else doing similar work. He then gets upset when scientists don't just defer to him.
Re: Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life
#33[stub for offtopicness]
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It’s more like a continuous eye roll since 2002 when he released _A New Kind of Science_.
I spent around 15 years working on stochastic lattice models. They can be amazing. They can also fail to capture the essence of the problem. Same with cellular automata.
They’re definitely not _new_. They weren’t new in 2002. I’ve always viewed Conway’s game of life as an interesting deterministic variant of an Ising model, and Ising models date back to the 1920s.
Most physicists I knew at the time looked at the book, shrugged, and kept working on what they were doing. I love lattice models, cellular automata, lattice fluid models, and the like. But they’re just one class of useful model.
And yet because Wolfram has a perpetual money machine called Mathematica, he’s got a huge megaphone to advocate for himself.
I’ll keep rolling my eyes. I don’t hate the guy, but he is just a little too into self-promotion for my taste.
Re: Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
It’s more like a continuous eye roll since 2002 when he released _A New Kind of Science_. I spent around 15 years working on stochastic lattice models. They can be amazing. They can also fail to capture the essence of the problem. Same with cellular automata. They’re definitely not _new_. They weren’t new in 2002. I’ve always viewed Conway’s game of life as an interesting deterministic variant of an Ising model, and…
"Still not sure which will become self-aware first: Wolfram Alpha, or Stephen Wolfram"
Re: Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life
#35I feel like I'm too dumb to understand whether these CA articles of his are interesting or just numerology deep-dives like people who spend their lives "investigating" the torah.
Re: Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
It’s more like a continuous eye roll since 2002 when he released _A New Kind of Science_. I spent around 15 years working on stochastic lattice models. They can be amazing. They can also fail to capture the essence of the problem. Same with cellular automata. They’re definitely not _new_. They weren’t new in 2002. I’ve always viewed Conway’s game of life as an interesting deterministic variant of an Ising model, and…
>I’ll keep rolling my eyes. I don’t hate the guy, but he is just a little too into self-promotion for my taste.
That's fair, but a lot of the hate here is unreasonable.
Re: Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life
#37The cool thing about Conway's Game of Life is that you can't predict it unless you do the full recursion, there is no shortcut. It relates to external undecidability of recurrent processes.
Wouldn't every Turing complete cellular automaton have this property? What would be an example of a nontrivial (i.e., sufficiently expressive) CA that is "predictable"?
I believe this is part of Wolfram's general point around computational irreducibility - there are none.
Re: Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
It’s more like a continuous eye roll since 2002 when he released _A New Kind of Science_. I spent around 15 years working on stochastic lattice models. They can be amazing. They can also fail to capture the essence of the problem. Same with cellular automata. They’re definitely not _new_. They weren’t new in 2002. I’ve always viewed Conway’s game of life as an interesting deterministic variant of an Ising model, and…
Not to weigh against Wolfram one last time, but he's (finally?) renamed Mathematica just "Wolfram". Why he would toss out years of brand-related goodwill is beyond me.
Re: Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a myopic view. How would we have gotten to the point of human history when capitalism became predominant if innovation is driven by capitalism? Also, humanity is hardly an economy of capitalism any more. More similar to oligarchical capital feudalism.
You're right, it's just a coincidence that the advent of capitalism and an unimaginable increase in global wealth happened at the same time. Thousands of texts written by historians and economists who dedicate their lives to understanding our past are totally wrong.
I'm not sure what you're saying is inconsistent with parent's comment: you're both talking about different points in time in humanity's history – the snark seems unwarranted.
Re: Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. He relates an interpretation/definition of the second law of thermodynamics- the increasing entropy thing- to his irreducibility. And builds a computational theory about the role and importance of the physics "observer" in these analyses. Computational irreducibility is basically a statement both about the intrinsic requirement for computation to arrive at the future, and also about the computational capability…
> I am a computational person, not a scientist, and I think science people find him to be speaking total garbage. That seems a correct assessment to me. His model of the world from physics perspective seems wrong. I don't think it's that he is speaking garbage, he is basically talking about digital physics which is a real theory being considered and researched, not pseudoscience. But he doesn't work with the scientif…
Though most academic disciplines have a strong "not invented here" bias. It makes you ignore anything outside your citation bubble or from different fields with somewhat different conventions and terms. Even if the other guys are academics as well.