Wolfram: Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life
30 comments
·March 19, 2025karparov
He didn't publish another "X is just like cellular automata which I invented 50 years ago!" post for over a month. I already got worried..
Those articles are always so long! Wolfram must be spending good chunk of his days working on those.
karparov
After having read large parts of this article, I must say I'm pretty appalled by how he elevates himself above John Conway. What a sad individual.
Suppafly
Did I get in before the Wolfram hate train started?
visarga
The cool thing about Conway's Game of Life is that you can't predict it unless you do the full recursion, there is no shortcut. It relates to external undecidability of recurrent processes.
shakna
Kaggle's competitions [0] do pull a lot of impressive little pieces of code, a number of which actually do take shortcuts. They do define a few things to make it more possible, and there is luck involved not just deterministic results.
[0] https://www.kaggle.com/c/conways-reverse-game-of-life-2020/o...
whatnow37373
"Computation irreducibility"[0] is Mr. Wolfram's word for it and I believe it has some relationship to his CA physics, but I won't pretend I understand.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_irreducibility
jonahbenton
Yes. He relates an interpretation/definition of the second law of thermodynamics- the increasing entropy thing- to his irreducibility. And builds a computational theory about the role and importance of the physics "observer" in these analyses. Computational irreducibility is basically a statement both about the intrinsic requirement for computation to arrive at the future, and also about the computational capability of the "observer"- a model, or our brains- to arrive, or not, at the future more efficiently.
I am a computational person, not a scientist, and I think science people find him to be speaking total garbage. That seems a correct assessment to me. His model of the world from physics perspective seems wrong. Nevertheless personally I find his computational lens/bias to be useful.
brzozowski
Wouldn't every Turing complete cellular automaton have this property? What would be an example of a nontrivial (i.e., sufficiently expressive) CA that is "predictable"?
amai
Cellular automata are actually useful to learn something about AI, too:
https://the-decoder.com/edge-of-chaos-yale-study-finds-sweet...
kccqzy
> if we want to get closer to the study of the pure phenomenon of innovation
Innovation in the real world is often driven by the usual incentives of capitalism, like the basic need to out-compete the competitors by improving quality or lowering costs. I do not really think Game of Life serves as a model for innovation in the real world; it might serve as a model of the pure phenomenon of innovation. In the real world, even things like pure math research is motivated by applied math, by monetary factors like NSF grants etc.
nickpsecurity
I agree. Going back further, we see the innovation drivers were God providing for man (Bible), people providing for their needs/wants at a societal level (most systems), individuals pursuing what they enjoy, seemingly random acts that go against reason, etc.
This was enacted via specific processes (human brain) using resources and their environment within their constraints, sometimes surplus. It involved local and global phenomenon that were dependent and independent.
In short, it's nothing like cellular automata or most simplistic models of the world. We'd have to model the above within this world's laws to know what drives innovation among humans in this world.
leepyaar
This is a myopic view.
How would we have gotten to the point of human history when capitalism became predominant if innovation is driven by capitalism?
Also, humanity is hardly an economy of capitalism any more. More similar to oligarchical capital feudalism.
enslavedrobot
You're right, it's just a coincidence that the advent of capitalism and an unimaginable increase in global wealth happened at the same time.
Thousands of texts written by historians and economists who dedicate their lives to understanding our past are totally wrong.
ForHackernews
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gexaha
thanks; interesting note in the end about Turing morphogenesis
MrMcCall
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r00t-
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procgen
There's much to be said!
seanw444
It's unfortunate that people seem to be prejudiced against Wolfram at this point, when the field has a lot to explore and learn from. Cellular automata are so powerful, yet so conceptually simple, it wouldn't surprise me if it did have revelations for more fundamental concepts of the universe.
What if the fundamentals of the universe are so simple it'd shock us, we just haven't looked at it from the right perspective yet, and we're over-complicating it?
criddell
> Cellular automata are so powerful
In what ways?
slightwinder
Maybe one reason for the reactions are that his articles start to smell like Maslow's hammer, where every problem is a nail.
null
9283409232
People should be able to separate the merits of the work from the worker but people didn't just randomly decide to not like Wolfram. He is a narcissist of the highest order.
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MrMcCall
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d_silin
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jmount
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If you like game of life you gonna love this video about backwards game of life: https://youtube.com/watch?v=g8pjrVbdafY