[rdtsc]

> A New Kind Of Science is full of pretty pictures and legitimately interesting ideas... it's also in essence, comprehensively wrong. Not a "not even wrong"; it rises to the level of "real" wrongness. But it's comprehensively, from top to bottom, wrong about practical utility or any future practical utility.

Yeah, after 20 some years, that's has to be the answer. At its basic level I think it just exploited the idea that people, including me, like to see interesting or complicated patterns, especially arising out of simple iterative rules like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30 or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110.

Of course, I can see how snail pattern or other natural patterns might be generated by a similar process but it's nowhere near revolutionizing any science like the title was claiming.

But Wolfram being Wolfram doesn't give up. There is the https://www.wolframinstitute.org and there is some activity there. I periodically drop by to see what's happening.

> They are not useful for engineering, which is precisely why we don't use them.

Exactly, we'd think by now they'd be some AI super-chip or something tangible based on of the cellular automata thing discovered by Wolfram.