Cellular Automata And Complexity: Collected Papers

by Stephen Wolfram

Book Overview

Are mathematical equations the best way to model nature? For many years it had been assumed that they were. But in the early 1980s, Stephen Wolfram made the radical proposal that one should instead build models that are based directly on simple computer programs. Wolfram made a detailed study of a class of such models known as cellular automata, and discovered a remarkable fact: that even when the underlying rules are very simple, the behavior they...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201626640
• ISBN13: 9780201626643
• Release Date: February 1994
• Publisher: CRC Press
• Length: 608 Pages
• Weight: 2.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 7.2" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Nice coverage of Wolframs published work

This is a nice collection of wolframs work on cellular automata (which first appeared as a number of papers in various physics journals). It is a nice coverage of cellular automata, but it would have been nice to give more credit to von Neuman for his pioneering work in cellular automata theory.There is also an annoying habit for all of his work to concentrate on deterministic cellular automata, and the mathematics is constrained to this. Recent work has indicated that the origin of complexity in our universe is from random sources that are preserved.. not that the complexity all came from the initial conditions. It is especially interesting to note in his book how the different rules of cellular automata play out to create varying degrees of complexity. It takes a very specific rule set indeed to allow for interesting complex behaviors to show up, as evinced by the long search Conway undertook to discover "life".Hopefully Wolfram will comment on the recent research that indicates that complexity is introduced into our universe through nondeterministic phenomena. He also should have presented Fredkins ideas about reversible computation to more fully flush out the relationship between cellular automata, computability and reversibility.