A New Kind of Science,   ISBN:9781579550080

Customer Rating: 

So far a very good book. Wofram seems to bring science to a new dimension. I am looking forward to our journey together.

Customer Rating: 

I think the author makes many good points about the potential of the possible benefits to science to be had by stepping outside conventional methods. There's so much going on in this book that I couldn't possibly grasp it all, especially considering my limited mathematics knowledge. More examples and metaphors would have been helpful also, but unfortunately, in the authors opinion they do more harm than good as he notes early in the notes section.

Customer Rating: 

If any single copy of this book perdures along the ages, the future generations that would find it burrowed somewhere could thing that all the mathematical and computer science achievements of the XX century belonged to Stephen Wolfram.

Customer Rating: 

I was amazed to receive this hard-cover book for such a bargain price, and for it to be in perfect condition. The shipping speed a little quicker than anticipated as well.

Customer Rating: 

I too could have written a very long review. I read this book when first issued -- cover-to-cover.

There are some interesting tidbits and examples. They are mostly things I have already seen in cellular automata (CA). It's the title itself that disturbs me. So I should explain why.

Basically, science is about two things, creating a model that explains behavior and testing the model to see whether or not it predicts behavior. I don't see how CA, as described in Wolfram's book helps with either process as much as I had hoped.

Wolfram seems to experiment with CA in order to emulate the behavior of interest, but offers fewer mechanisms for building the models. In terms of prediction, I should state a testable hypothesis and then demonstrate (through experiment or theorem)that I can predict the behavior of the system under study. Wolfram's book looks backwards to see if I modeled the behavior that already occurred. I'd really like to make a prediction about something I have not fully studied then analyze it to see that my model did indeed predict the behavior.

I don't see how A New Kind of Science is any kind of science yet.

Robert Ferguson