Notes from The H. Paul Rockwood Memorial Lecture: A New Kind of Science - Stephen Wolfram UC San Diego April 30, 2003




Intro by Terrence Sejnowski
Director Institute for Neural Computation

Wolfram Science Website


Cellular automata 1981

Rule 30

Rule 110

"Its sort of interesting to think about how we interact with the ultimate limits of technology. I don't have any doubt that there will be a time, potentially quite soon when it will be possible to capture all the important features of human thinking in pieces of sold-state electronics and no doubt things will get more and more efficent until everything is on an atomic scalle so that our processes of human thinking are just implemented by individual electrons whizzing around in lumps of something."

Computational equivalence


"... if everything was computationally reducible, then nothing could be acheived by history."

worked every day and every night for 10 years while CEO of Wolfram Research

NKS represents a Kuhnian paradigm shift.

Took 20 years to think about... so read it carefully. Read the notes.
Used Mathematica as notation.

Look at NKSX - NKS Explorer.

Summary of NKS
1. New areas of basic science.
2. Whole bunches of applications.
3. Conceptual directions.