

A New Kind of Science is on the iPad - nswanberg
http://blog.wolfram.com/2010/09/21/a-new-kind-of-science-is-on-the-ipad/

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travisjeffery
For people who've read 'A New Kind of Science' on here...what did you think of
it?

I find that people's opinions of the book are quite polarized either they
found it fascinating or were put-off by Wolfram's self-congratulating. So what
does HN think?

~~~
jacobolus
My impression was that there were about 50 or 100 pages worth of insight,
padded out and repeated over and over again to fill a 1100 page (or whatever)
book. I only made it to about page 500 before giving up, feeling like I’d read
the same part 3 or 4 times already, and just skimming the rest and looking at
the pictures. Wolfram’ prose also oozes ego, which doesn’t help.

Weinberg’s review in the New York Review was quite good:
[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2002/oct/24/is-
the-...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2002/oct/24/is-the-universe-
a-computer/?pagination=false)

~~~
elblanco
I've worked under a person very much like Wolfram in terms of an ego so large
they can't see the world around it. I remember having a product planning
meeting one time where he went into a great detail about this sweeping plan he
had come up with. With a great many diagrams and thought points and slides (oh
the slides!), he described a system he believed would radically change
humanity, advance the species etc. etc. etc. At the end of his speech,
somebody asked, "aren't you just describing essentially this piece of
technology <listing several extant examples>?" To which he paused for a good
minute, minute and a half and responded "no! it's totally different!" It
reminded me of the 7 minute abs routine.

The problem was not that he hadn't come up with something interesting. It was
that what he had come up with was something everybody had come up with. He had
just spent so much time holed up in his office writing and making diagrams
that he hadn't poked his head up into the world enough to realize that he
hadn't come up with anything unique or interesting.

This ego feeding manifested itself in all kinds of interesting ways. For
example, his ego required that the things we were producing were _unique_
based on what he knew. Even if we were building something that was essentially
the same thing that everybody else in the world had built, he'd direct us to
build it in some fashion that often ignored the practical results of good
engineering practice (learned through thousands of iterations of trial and
error over decades) and make it function in a way that was unique to our
products, but not necessarily better, and because we were ignored so many hard
lessons others had learned for us, often with significant downsides. Long
after these things had been implemented, and the downsides of this approach
were now readily apparent and in-your-face, we'd go back to him -- to which
his reply would be, "I'll have a solution in the next version!"

Months later he'd roll out his new development roadmap that failed entirely to
address those issues, pretending like they had never been brought up (no
Adoubt since they bruised his ego) and sent us off in another random, but
already well understood direction, but cock angled so we'd end up making
another round of well documented mistakes.

A real simple example, instead of showing aggregate sums for discrete values
in a data field as a simple bar chart, he insisted we use a different metaphor
that had long since been abandoned by the field -- only he refused to
acknowledge it. This fit the "novelty" requirement for his ego, but failed the
"useful" part of building software.

What finally ended it all was a perfect storm of past customers all coming and
complaining that they weren't getting the product they were paying for. In
some cases we'd even been paid to fix long outstanding problems created by our
failure to design well understood parts of the software around well understood
metaphors. The result is that he very quickly went to being "no longer with
the company".

My lessons from that experience is that innovation is important, but it has to
be built on the solid foundation of past experience. Even Newton understood
this, "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of
Giants."

The problem with something like "A New Kind of Science" is that it's not new.
It's a study of the applications of a well understood field onto other fields.
If it was written without ego the title would have been "A Study of the
Applications of Cellular Automata and State Machines" or "Recognizing
Computation in Cross-Domain Studies Using Cellular Automata", or the lofty "An
Exhautive Review of Cellular Automata with Applications as Turing Machines."
In other words, NKS brings us back to square one with Turing's "What is
computable?" Only looked at from another angle.

It's not that what's in the book isn't interesting, it is. It's that it's not
revolutionary in the way Wolfram wishes it was. It's "merely" evolutionary and
Wolfram refuses to understand that. And just like my old Boss always chided us
with a "wait and see" and a twinkle in his eye whenever we pointed this out,
Wolfram's response is "wait and see".

------
Tichy
I would have hoped for actual simulations instead of diagrams :-)

~~~
nswanberg
It would be interesting to see how effective those programs would be if run on
the device. I can't decide if I'd have found them enlightening or distracting.

Setting aside Wolfram's book, I also wonder if Knuth's Art of Computer
Programming, Abelson and Sussman's Structure and Interpretation of Computer
Programs, or the Introduction to Algorithms books would benefit. We'll see
soon I'm sure.

But getting back to the static version, certainly one benefit is to avoid
carrying the dead tree versions, as Wolfram pointed out.

~~~
glhaynes
When I think "which of my college classes could I have learned more from if
I'd had an iPad version of the textbook", data structures and algorithms
stands out the most. I'd love to see a really good adaptation of an already-
good static textbook in these fields... I'm not in school anymore, but I might
read it just for fun.

~~~
jacobolus
Yes. Both data structures and CS theory (making proofs about different
computation models, &c.) courses would benefit tremendously even from having
better PC/web-based visualizations/simulations. Stepping through the behavior
of turing machines, or graph searching algorithms, or what have you, is much
much clearer on a computer than on a blackboard or paper.

------
slpsys
"The actual print production process was quite an adventure—going right to the
edge of what was possible."

I liked the book a lot, but have a hard time not seeing this as hyperbole.
Yes, it's the printing industry..but it's just just diagrams and text; I don't
remember anything that a few weeks of learning LaTeX couldn't accomplish?

~~~
silvestrov
I think that he means getting print production in sufficient high dpi without
getting e.g. unwanted moire patterns or blur of details. The postscript file
might be conceptually simple, but there's a lot of weird problems when mass-
printing in high quality, both dpi-wise and color-wise.

edit: typo.

~~~
nswanberg
Note that the book itself had a build process! (which he linked to in the
post)

<http://www.stephenwolfram.com/scrapbook/page8/#2002_build>

~~~
Erwin
Interestingly, the entire text of the book is right there on that page: just
zoom in far enough (using some kind of Flash app):
<http://www.stephenwolfram.com/scrapbook/page8/#2002_poster>

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bgutierrez
Summary: So far, only the iPad has been an awesome enough e-reader to make
Stephen Wolfram willing to release "A New Kind of Science" to be viewed on it.

------
jackfoxy
I found the footnotes, which are about as long as the text, to be a very
interesting stand-alone read. Wolfram's self-congratulating doesn't bother me,
although his work sometimes borders on confusing a posteriori computer models
with reality. (Not that he's the only one who does that.) I highly recommend
NKS.

------
billmcneale
What's the point of an iPad version? At least in book form, it's useful as a
door stop.

