Reddit reviews A New Kind of Science

I know people love to hate on it but that's largely what Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind Of Science is about. It is, basically, a way of showing how many of natures most complex designs can be represented by very simple sets of rules.

Here's some lighter reading I've liked:

• Analog Circuit Design: Art, Science and Personalities
  
• The Chip : How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution
  
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
  
• Feynamn Lectures on Computation
  
  Readable, but more hardcore
  
  Hardware:
  
  
• The Design of CMOS Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuits, Second Edition
  
  
  Mathy:
  
  
• A New Kind of Science. I liked this book a lot, it is worth the price just for the interesting pictures. Make up your mind for yourself, and don't let negative reviewers unduly influence you.
  
• Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
  
• Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms
  
  
  Programmy:
  
  
• Mastering Regular Expressions
  
  Unixy:
  
  
• Unix Power Tools
  
  
  Off the wall:
  
  
• Molecular Biology of the Cell
  
  

and theres always this as well http://www.amazon.com/New-Kind-Science-Stephen-Wolfram/dp/1579550088

Books on Fractal Geometry tend to have pretty pictures:

Indra's Pearls: The Vision of Felix Klein by David Mumford et al.

Beauty of Fractals by Heinz-Otto Peitgen et al

Fractal Geometry of Nature by Benoit Mandelbrot

For what it's worth New Kind of Science by Stepeh Wolfram has tons of pretty pictures, even if the content is dubious.



you might also want to checkout the Non-Euclidean Geometry for babies and other similar titles.

If you'd like to learn more about the fibonacci spiral in nature and other patterns in nature based on underlying math, consider a light read of the first 700 pages of A New Kind of Science by God King slash Universal Mind Genius slash Erotic Sex Lord Stephen Wolfram.

Wow. Thanks for taking such a close look at it. I took a summer class on deterministic cellular automata that generate chaotic patterns like this one (we basically just worked off of Wolfram's "New Kind of Science"), so it's pretty exciting to encounter such a pattern unexpectedly "in the wild".

I'm not sure if it's clear what I intended this thing to do, but the idea is that on frame x+1 squares are black only if they had an odd number of black neighbors on frame x and white otherwise.

What seems to be happening instead is that each square's color is being updated as its being checked, so square (1, 1) is determining it's state by the new state of squares (0, 0), (0, 1), (0, 2), and (1, 0) and the current state of the other four squares its adjacent to.

I don't really understand why it's doing that because neighborCount is incremented based on a check of pixelArray[x][y] and is then used to set a value in newArray[x][y] which is then used to set color. There shouldn't be any way for neighborCount to see values in newArray, but there is somehow. I can only think that somehow pixelArray is being constantly updated to be the same as newArray, but I don't understand why. They're set to be equal in only 2 locations, at the end of setup() and after next_frame() is called.

Does using draw rect improve performance? I've found it takes about a half second to draw each frame with 10x10 squares. I've assumed this is due to it checking almost 60,000 if statements per frame, but maybe having that many nodes loaded is a memory sink?

Thanks again.

read the top comment on his book at amazon

A New Kind of Science

I'm pretty unfamiliar with your work (except W|A), so I looked up one of your books on Amazon. The top rated review is rather dismissive (one star). I'm sure you're aware of this. Care to comment on it? Is he judging your work unfairly?

Not what I was thinking at all. Read these:

http://www.amazon.com/New-Kind-Science-Stephen-Wolfram/dp/1579550088

http://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371004122&sr=1-1&keywords=godel+escher+bach

And try out this free online course:
http://www.santafe.edu/education/schools/sfi-mooc/introduction-complexity/

I wonder what the author would think of some of the cellular automata in A New Kind of Science.

If you want to dive into cellular automata in a fairly approachable but very deep way, consider Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. For more academic treatments, maybe Schiff's Cellular Automata?

A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram (the Mathematica guy) is supposed to be good. Never read it myself, very much want to at some point: http://www.amazon.com/New-Kind-Science-Stephen-Wolfram/dp/1579550088/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330979913&sr=8-1