Ray Kurzweil
A New Kind of Science is an unusually wide-ranging book covering issues basic to biology, physics, perception, computation, and philosophy. It is also a remarkably narrow book in that its 1,200 pages discuss a singular subject, that of cellular automata. … I find Stephen Wolfram’s enthusiasm for his own ideas refreshing. I am reminded of a comment made by the Buddhist teacher Guru Amrit Desai, when he looked out of his car window and saw that he was in the midst of a gang of Hell’s Angels. After studying them in great detail for a long while, he finally exclaimed, “They really love their motorcycles.” There was no disdain in this observation. Guru Desai was truly moved by the purity of their love for the beauty and power of something that was outside themselves. Well, Wolfram really loves his cellular automata. So much so, that he has immersed himself for over ten years in the subject and produced what can only be regarded as a tour de force on their mathematical properties and potential links to a broad array of other endeavors. In the end notes, which are as extensive as the book itself, Wolfram explains his approach: “There is a common style of understated scientific writing to which I was once a devoted subscriber. But at some point I discovered that more significant results are usually incomprehensible if presented in this style. And so in writing this book I have chosen to explain straightforwardly the importance I believe my various results have.” Perhaps Wolfram’s successful technology business career may also have had its influence here, as entrepreneurs are rarely shy about articulating the benefits of their discoveries. … Wolfram’s sweeping and ambitious treatise paints a compelling but ultimately overstated and incomplete picture. Wolfram joins a growing community of voices that believe that patterns of information, rather than matter and energy, represent the more fundamental building blocks of reality. Wolfram has added to our knowledge of how patterns of information create the world we experience and I look forward to a period of collaboration between Wolfram and his colleagues so that we can build a more robust vision of the ubiquitous role of algorithms in the world.