
Scott Aaronson tears NKS apart [pdf] - pookleblinky
http://scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.pdf
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DanielBMarkham
I'm more impressed with the book than the review.

It's a good review, no doubt, but I think Aaronson, while catching Wolfram
using a bit of hyperbole on occasions, misses the essence of what NKS is.

It's not simply a review of existing CS theory.

The Feynman quote was quite illuminating. Wolfram does take the discrete
conversation to the next step. He doesn't answer the questions, mainly because
what he is proposing is, well, a New Kind of Science. Which means that there
are going to be hundreds or thousands of questions.

What might be missing the most is a methodology for exploration. But I think
overall Wolfram is just a bit ahead of his time. Those things will be worked
out.

~~~
slackenerny
Because it was no review but an analysis. Review is when renowed reviewer
gives his opinion which is backed by his authority. When your'e a poor grad
student, like Aaronson in 2002, then you better withold emotional opinons and
give facts.

 _he is proposing_

And what Aaronson analyses is that book's statements form no proposal.

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1gor
Wolfram's talent for self-promotion has been nicely demonstrated by the
publicity campaign ahead of his WolframAlpha launch. Multiple pre-
announcements, screenshots, peek-reviews, demos have been appearing on NH for
weeks already.

Which may not be a bad thing, except it all comes at a price of credibility.
Why does one need to create all that fuzz? Isn't it because the revolutionary
product/idea cannot win followers and reputation solely on its merits?

Same applies to his book. With a bit of modesty its impact could have been so
much greater. Especially since its subject is indeed fascinating.

~~~
mikedouglas
Since when has Hacker News, with its highly entrepreneurial core, ever so
viciously attacked publicity? I haven't read NKS, so maybe I don't understand
the depths of this man's capital offense, but I see nothing in your list that
any smart business won't do. Maybe it isn't revolutionary (whatever that
means), but it's a damn cool project that's going to be useful to a lot of
people, and isn't that all we care about?

 _Isn't it because the revolutionary product/idea cannot win followers and
reputation solely on its merits?_

If the odds are worse without promotion, what rational human wouldn't use it?

~~~
wheels
_Since when has Hacker News, with its highly entrepreneurial core, ever so
viciously attacked publicity?_

I believe the last time was Cuil.

Being able to work the hype machine is great, but if you generate more hype
than you can deliver on it hurts your image. Since _A New Kind of Science_ was
similarly underwhelming, not to mention even more pretentiously hyped, many
are cynical.

~~~
mikedouglas
_I believe the last time was Cuil._

Cuil's sin was failing at a solved problem, and most plainly, trying to be a
"Google killer" (I believe they lectured Google on the size of their search
database before they even launched).

NLP answer engines aren't a solved problem, and WA was a pretty decent 1.0.
Sure it failed techcrunch's vanity test, but for what Wolfram promised in
those videos, it performs.

~~~
wheels
I think what you're saying is true, but it's orthogonal to my point. Both of
them generated more hype than they delivered on in their launches and people
were underwhelmed. That WA has more promise is a separate matter.

~~~
slackenerny
It is interesting to parallel Wolfram with Thinking Machines founders.

It is a rather little known fact that, trained through TM catastrophe, its
founders went on to form a stealth company, called Ab Initio, which is wildly
successful despite having no marketing. Indeed they're actively avoiding it
through NDA contracts to the point that general public doesn't exactly know
what exactly their products do.

I am not ridiculing Wolfram, just wanted to point that above is as an
interesting anecdote.

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tophat02
Wolfram is remarkably short-sighted. You'd think that such a smart guy would
have realized that spending 1100+ pages blowing is own horn would tend to turn
off the very people he hoped to convince.

They say that love is blind, ego must just be plain blinding.

~~~
asciilifeform
> You'd think that such a smart guy would have realized...

This is the best theory I've seen yet to explain his behavior:

[http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math/msg/37f51351f5340e58...](http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math/msg/37f51351f5340e58?dmode=source&output=gplain)

It makes a lot of sense, in light of the man's biography.

See this:

<http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/>

for an informed critic's perspective on the details.

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wheels
Kurzweil's write-up on it is also good:

<http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0464.html?printable=1>

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asciilifeform
I prefer this review:

<http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/>

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danbmil99
Wolfram is a brilliant, egotistical, narcissistic credit hog. The history of
science is littered with them. Some of the greatest discoveries of mankind are
credited to the wrong people.

~~~
gustavo_duarte
Can you give examples? I'm genuinely interested. Rosalind Franklin and DNA is
about the only 'greatest discovery' I know of where I think credit wasn't
given where it was due.

Also, SW hasn't gotten anywhere near a 'greatest discovery', so I'm not sure
the comparison is valid.

~~~
mnemonicsloth
Everyone likes to talk about the immortality that comes with proving an
important mathematical result, but it's rarely that easy:

The first publication on the Mobius strip was written by a guy named Listing,
who did the same work as Mobius at the same time. I have to warn you that
googling "Listing Strip" is slightly NSFW.

Kalman was only the popularizer of the Kalman Filter.

Grassman, who invented vector spaces and developed a lot of linear algebra,
only got credit posthumously.

Some people, like Fourier, only _inspired_ the theory named for them. Modern
theory is so much more general than classical theory that entire careers can
be built by translating an old mathematical idea to a new domain.

Sometimes, a new idea gets labeled as an extension to an existing idea if it
so much as resembles an old idea. For example, the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman
equation was Bellman's work. This is dangerous if you're after immortality --
there are very few ideas in math that aren't even slightly hinted at in the
works of: Euler, Gauss, Jacobi, Hamilton, Lagrange, Laplace, etc.

Sometimes, though, the new guys can usurp the old. When set theory being laid
down as the core idea in all of mathematics, the mathematicians who
reformulated ideas in rigorous set-theoretic language often got the new names.
That's why we now have the Haar Measure instead of the Hurwitz Invariant
Integral.

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Sephr
Until I read the PDF, I assumed this would be about Nobody Knows Shoes. It's
better to abbreviate A New Kind of Science as ANKOS to avoid confusion.

~~~
ninguem2
I prefer WANKOS (Wolfram's ANKOS...)

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rw
Thanks for the alley-oop? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=612002>

