http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Stephen-Wolfram-A-New-Kind-of-Science-Online-Table-of-tp519480.html
I just got a copy of NKS .. which is also available on-line:
(attached) had helpful remarks. I find the book irritating so far due
to the excessive "I then invented XXX" and that sort of thing. But it
> The most maddening thing about NKS is the lack of attribution of
> results. If you read the last line of the paragraph at the top of
> column 2 of page 945, you might think that Wolfram had found the
> smallest counter-example to Euler's conjecture extending Fermat's last
> theorem, but I did.
>
> I have done extensive work on the Connection Machine studying the
> usefulness of Rule 30 as a pseudo-random number generator. I classify
> PRNGs as good, bad or ugly. Good ones pass tests and have provable
> qualities. Bad ones don't pass tests. Ugly ones like Rule 30 pass the
> tests so far applied, but you can't predict anything like the period,
> and you can't prevent correlation of parallel streams. Furthermore,
> despite Wolfram's assertions, Rule 30 is very inefficient: the number
> of operations (even with the universal bit op-code structure of the CM)
> required to produce one random value using Rule 30 is much larger than
> the number needed with a good PRNG. I modified the Rule 30 PRNG that
> Carl Feynman had written under Wolfram's guidance in order to avoid
> patterns that I had found which generated short periods. I also added
> a
> fast, parallelizable PRNG to the CM library.
>
> I have learned some interesting things from NKS about studying CAs by
> considering the additive and renormalization properties of their
> operations. I can't tell whether these ideas came from Wolfram, but it
> was good to discover them in his book. I have also been provoked to do
> experiments in order to try to disprove his results, and at one point I
> thought I had, so I wrote to him but later realized that I had misread
> the claims. His assistant wrote back with the correction and told me
> that Wolfram remembered my name and was glad that I was reading his
> book.
>
> I am less than half way through the book, so I haven't read the more
> speculative chapters, but I have read many of the reviews
> (
http://www.math.usf.edu/~eclark/ANKOS_reviews.html). My impression is
> that when a specialist in one of the sciences reviews NKS, that
> scientist usually reports that Wolfram's speculations in that field
> either are known to be wrong or have been known to be true for some
> time. Brian Hayes' choice of the term "delusional history" (American
> Scientist, July-August 2002) may sadly be a correct diagnosis.
>
> -Roger Frye