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By the same argument, it's mathematics because John Conway was a mathematician, and it's physics because Ulam and Von Neumann were physicists.

I think this is 'Reaction-diffusion models'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction%E2%80%93diffusion_sys...

The idea iiuc, is that pattern formation in animals depends on molecules diffusing through the growing system (the body) and reacting where the waves of molecules overlap.

Alan Turing is FAR from the first computer scientist, though, if we want to be pedantic

Right. is "the basic science of what simple rules do" not the same as Formal systems?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_system

It is generative functions. Wolfram is grifting again.

> it's like pattern matching on steroids that I haven't seen in lisp world

But it does exist in the FP world: Prolog, Erlang.

It's a great blend of Lisp and APL, wrapped up in a notebook interface with first-class interactivity.

Mostly I just use it as an overpowered calculator though.

I don't get the down voting. Yes, it lacks primitive ontology, exactly.

I don’t know, I’ve been involved in computer science for several decades now and cellular automata hasn’t really lost its charm. Seems like a cool thing to dedicate your life to!

Whenever Wolfram brings up cellular automata again, I think of John Conway who got tired of being known for Conway's Game of Life.

What topic will yours have been wasted on?

It's his life. I can certainly look at many other lives and say they are lot of more wasted than his. Heck, he already created Mathematica, if he wanted to go and lay on the beach for the rest of this life, it would still be a lot less wasted than what many other people have accomplished in related domains.

Yeah, I don't like his arrogance, it's very grating to read. And perhaps nothing revolutionary is going to end up as a result of all the play with cellular automata but it's still interesting. Not as a rule, but sometimes discoveries in history are made by wild and wacky directions of research.

That seems quite a bold eulogy, no?

Isn't he well accomplished, and prolific throughout his life?

Thanks for the laugh. :D

It's just Wolfram explaining how he likes stuying things that can be describe by simple rules and how complexity can emerge in spite of (or because of?) the seeming simplicity of those rules. He came up with a word for it, and while I think "ruliology" sounds a bit silly, it does say what's on the tin.

With Wolfram it is usually the grandstanding and taking credit for other people's work. Inventing new words for old things is part and parcel of that. He has a lot in common with Schmidhuber, both are arguably very smart people but the fact that other people can be just as smart doesn't seem to fit their worldview.

Wolfram has failed to live up to his promise of providing tools to make progress on fundamental questions of science.

From my understanding, there are two ideas that Wolfram has championed: Rule 110 is Turing machine equivalent (TME) and the principle of computational equivalence (PCE).

Rule 110 was shown to be TME by Cook (hired by Wolfram) [0] and was used by Wolfram as, in my opinion, empirical evidence to support the claim that Turing machine equivalence is the norm, not the exception (PCE).

At the time of writing of ANKOS, there was a popular idea that "complexity happens at the edge of chaos". PCE pushes back against that, effectively saying the opposite, that you need a conspiracy to prevent Turning machine equivalence. I don't want to overstate the idea but, in my opinion, PCE is important and provides some, potentially deep, insight.

But, as far as I can tell, it stops there. What results has Wolfram proved, or paid others to prove? What physical phenomena has Wolfram explained? Entanglement still remains a mystery, the MOND vs. dark matter rages on, others have made progress on busy beaver, topology, Turing machine lower bounds and relations between run-time and space, etc. etc. The world of physics, computer science, mathematics, chemistry, biology, and most of the others, continues on using classical, and newly developed tools independent of Wolfram, that have absolutely nothing to do with cellular automata.

Wolfram is building a "new kind of science" tool but has failed to provide any use cases of when the tool would actually help advance science.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110

> not reading

Respectfully, I think that is a mistake.

Yes, he frequently exhibits an ego the size of Jupiter. But he is very smart†, and he writes well, and this stuff that theyre doing is at least interesting. I don't know if its physics or metaphysics or something else entirely, and it may be just empty tail-chasing, but I reckon its at least worth paying some attention to.

† and he's also built a long-term business making and selling extremely capable maths tooling, of all things, which I think is worth some respect

And you thought your decision to not1 read the article was worth sharing why?

At least Wolfram's ego led him to contribute something interesting.

If you want other people to name something after you, you have to give it a name they have reason to replace.

Wolframology is the study of Stephen Wolfram.

yeah i get the emotional push back but putting that aside, he still seems fairly well accomplished, more-so than me by a long shot and at least he is throwing nerdy ideas out there we can think about or discuss.

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The Wolfram Engine (essentially the Wolfram Language interpreter/execution environment) is free: https://www.wolfram.com/engine/. You can download it and run Wolfram code.

Wolfram Mathematica (the Jupyter Notebook-like development environment) is paid, but there are free and open source alternatives like https://github.com/WLJSTeam/wolfram-js-frontend.

> WLJS Notebook ... [is] A lightweight, cross-platform alternative to Mathematica, built using open-source tools and the free Wolfram Engine.

You can play around with this:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/

Isn't this his personal blog? The domain name is "stephenwolfram.com", this is his personal website. Of course there will be "I"'s and "me"'s — this website is about him and what he does.

As for falsifiability:

> You have some particular kind of rule. And it looks as if it’s only going to behave in some particular way. But no, eventually you find a case where it does something completely different, and unexpected.

So I guess to falsify a theory about some rule you just have to run the rule long enough to see something the theory doesn't predict.

Sure, but everyone always says that. What do you think of what he wrote about?

Some things, like the foundations of mathematics, are not falsifiable.

You judge them by how useful they are.

Ruliology is a bit like that.

That's his style. It's not just his blog style, it's the same in his book.

https://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200207/stephen_wolframs_unfor...