A New Kind of Science
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| Author | Stephen Wolfram |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Complex systems |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Wolfram Media |
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Publication date
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2002 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 1197 |
| ISBN | |
| Website | |
A New Kind of Science is a best-selling, controversial book by Stephen Wolfram, published by his own company in 2002. It contains an empirical and systematic study of computational systems such as cellular automata. Wolfram calls these systems simple programs and argues that the scientific philosophy and methods appropriate for the study of simple programs are relevant to other fields of science.
The thesis of A New Kind of Science (NKS) is twofold: that the nature of computation must be explored experimentally, and that the results of these experiments have great relevance to understanding the physical world. Since its nascent beginnings in the 1930s, computation has been primarily approached from two traditions: engineering, which seeks to build practical systems using computations; and mathematics, which seeks to prove theorems about computation. However, as recently as the 1970s, computing has been described as being at the crossroads of mathematical, engineering, and empirical traditions.
Wolfram introduces a third tradition that seeks to empirically investigate computation for its own sake: He argues that an entirely new method is needed to do so because traditional mathematics fails to meaningfully describe complex systems, and that there is an upper limit to complexity in all systems.
The basic subject of Wolfram's "new kind of science" is the study of simple abstract rules—essentially, elementary computer programs. In almost any class of a computational system, one very quickly finds instances of great complexity among its simplest cases (after a time series of multiple iterative loops, applying the same simple set of rules on itself, similar to a self-reinforcing cycle using a set of rules). This seems to be true regardless of the components of the system and the details of its setup. Systems explored in the book include, amongst others, cellular automata in one, two, and three dimensions; mobile automata; Turing machines in 1 and 2 dimensions; several varieties of substitution and network systems; primitive recursive functions; nested recursive functions; combinators; tag systems; register machines; reversal-addition. For a program to qualify as simple, there are several requirements:
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