Eric Cordian wrote:
Steve Schear writes:
Stephen Wolfram's book, "A New Kind of Science," is nothing if not interesting. This encyclopedia-sized volume traces how his fascination with cellular automata, beginning in the 1970s, led him to spend decades exploring the significance of complexity created from simple rules.
I bought a copy the day it came out. It's an interesting read, but as far as I can tell, contains nothing of startling import. It contains not a single proof. It merely suggests that Cellular Automata are sufficiently rich to model any physical process, and maybe someone, someday, will use them for that purpose.
Then again, so are Turing Machines.
Conway proved long ago that cellular automata can model Turing machines (see "Winning Ways", Berlekamp, Guy and Conway (in some order I forget) for the proof - and many other amusing distractions). Cheers, Ben. -- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.thebunker.net/ "There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff