After having read 2/3 of this, I began to entertain the idea that this might indeed be an honest praise of Alan Turing's work, without the Wolfram ego spin that we all expect. One can hope, right? Unfortunately, that was right before Wolfram goes on to explain how much further Wolfram sees than Turing ever could, how Turing would be impressed by all the significant results of Wolfram, how enthusiastic Turing would have been about Wolfram Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, and finally, how Wolfram Wolfram Wolfram Wolfram.
In other words, this is exactly the article I expected.
I wish you could give Wolfram a break and look at him with liberated eyes. I don't think there's anything exceptionally egocentric about this article unless you look for it - in fact I find it quite disturbing that you would want to make this celebration of Turing into a piece about Wolfram's ego. Sure Wolfram's glasses are no doubt tinted by his own ideas, but what entrepreneur's isn't? If any, people at HN should be aware of this and I find it sad the lack of sympathy for a man who, when it comes down to it, has actually done good things and contributed to this world.
It's interesting that you measure Wolfram's behavior by entrepreneurial standards. Indeed, I have much respect for his commercial successes, Mathematica is a great and useful program. And I have no real qualms about him boasting that Mathematica and Alpha are the greatest inventions since sliced bread, that's to be expected of anyone trying to sell a product.
But Wolfram is also a scientist, and the ideals in science are a bit different. A scientist is supposed to be humble, admit the limitations of his work, and acknowledge the contributions of others. This is expressed in the famous quote by Isaac Newton: "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants." Of course scientists are only human and don't always hold up to that ideal (maybe Newton least of all), but it's still important to recognize the difference between a scientific argument and a sales pitch.
I've heard about that, and I'm not convinced. Here's the quote in context:
> What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
So if it's (also) meant as a quip, it's a friendly one. And in either case, the saying goes back to the middle ages and was always meant metaphorically.
A lecturer and mentor I had at university worked closely with Turing during and after the war, and I never knew until recently. I've had no news of his death, so I'm desperately hoping to be able to catch up with him next time I'm back home, and perhaps get him to reminisce.
PS: Please fix the title. The article has it right - it's "Alan".
Question to those in the know: I've done a lot of data mining, statistics and inverse problems, but I've never even looked at cellular automata. Am I missing anything?
What are they used for - what problems can they solve that other methods can't?
So what's the big deal - why does Wolfram seem to think they are the answer to the world's problems? I'm confused - there must be something there, as he's obviously a smart guy.
Wolfram has - correctly - noted that complexity can arise from simple systems (think Conway's Game of Life, but even simpler - Wolfram is into one-dimensional equivalents). This is, he says, akin to how many biological systems work (e.g. individual cells/neurons are pretty simple, but a human is very complex).
He also - correctly - observes that the explosion in computational power afforded by modern computers make certain scientific investigations possible that were previously infeasible (e.g. the proof of the four-colour theorem relying on exhaustively testing some 1800 possible scenarios, or numerical simulation of some very complex phenomena).
He then combines these two passions of his and asserts that therefore, computation based on simple systems gives insight into the secrets of life, the universe, and everything.
I can understand that position. If he's correct, it would seem like a small task to search the computational landscape and find automata that predict biological behavior or physics systems better than current models. Is this his approach? I don't see many (any?) papers like this in any of the fields I'm involved in - so has it been successful?
It's harder than you might think to model real physics with a cellular automaton.
Cellular automata are simulated on regular grids of cells, which gives them anisotropic (direction-dependent) behavior. For example, moving patterns in most automata can only travel in certain preferred directions (like gliders in Conway's game of life). And patterns that can move in multiple directions usually travel with different speeds in each direction.
In the real world, we don't observe any anisotropy in space, so none of the cellular automata I've seen proposed up to this point can model real physics, even in principle.
Lattice gas automata use hexagonal grids instead of square grids to alleviate this problem somewhat, but the anisotropy never really goes away, it's just reduced.
That seems to be the approach he's advocating, yes. As to its success - well, you don't see many (any?) papers like this...
If you are interested in this, go read "Gödel Escher Bach". It brilliantly explores this complexity-from-simplicity theme and the consequences of various viewpoints. E.g. you can easily observe/guess whether someone likes to eat curry; however, deriving this from the atoms making up said person is utterly infeasible.
They're really simple, slight variations yield drastically different behaviour, and some setups are Turing-equivalent (given some liberties of interpretation). This is Wolfram's argument on why they would stand with the Riemann-Zeta function as most beloved to Alan Turing, if he'd only known about them.
More fundamentally underlying his advocacy is Wolfram's obsession with the things, which, 30 years on, has not yielded very much. They don't seem to be terribly useful. His wider investigation of the structure of computation is certainly worthwhile, but CAs, at least in the form Wolfram's written his bible about [1], don't seem to be the philosophical revelation he promoted them as.
I can understand not bringing up that Alan committed suicide but I don't see why Wolfram just passingly mentions that Alan was gay but doesn't mention at all the UK's treatment of him because he was gay. Maybe Alan would still be alive if the UK hadn't convicted him of, basically, being gay, and forced him to take hormone injections...
In other words, this is exactly the article I expected.