Like many others, I thought that the title of
Wolfram's NKS book is not appropriate. Yet maybe it
is indeed a first step to a new kind of science.
I guess the main "new" thing in Wolfram's NKS is
the attempt for a systematic exploration of the world
of computational systems. He considers in his NKS
book not only all possible CA, but also a lot
of other computational systems as well, for
instance Turing machines or substitution systems.
http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.htmlA systematic exploration of the world of computational
systems is a bit like mathematics. What Wolfram and his
group name NKS is "exploratory computing" instead
of "exploratory calculating". I would say it is
perhaps the mathematics of the 21st century, instead
of equations we have computations, and instead of
numbers and functions we have agents and interactions.
It has no direct application, but it is worthwhile
and pleasant because the world of computational systems
is an entire universe of it's own, see also the
following article from Kovas Boguta
"Complexity and the paradigm of Wolfram's A new kind of science:
>From the computational sciences to the science of computation"
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/110471335/ABSTRACTTherefore I like the idea of "The Wolfram Atlas
of Simple programs", a new project initiated
by the "Wolfram Science Group" around Kovas Boguta
and others which can be found at
http://atlas.wolfram.com/It has for example for every of the 255 2-dim
CA (
http://atlas.wolfram.com/01/01/) a backtracking
tree, a power spectrum, and a state transition diagram.
Fascinating.
-J.
Locked
