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The idea of small rules leading to large patterns is not something Wolfram invented, but he seems to think he did. I think Conway's game of life predates it, as does Mandelbrot, then there is the Durer pentagon.

Maybe there is a something I am missing though?

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From what I have heard, what you're missing is Wolfram's ego. That's why he magnifies the importance of what he has done.

I mean, Mathematica is a truly great, great piece of software, but his "New Kind of Science" was both utterly worthless and a fantastic treatise on how a person's grandiose religion of self leads to utter delusion.

I started to read it when I college, and read hundreds of pages into it before I started to realize that there was nothing there. The entire book can be summed up as "complexity arises from multiple iterations on simplicity" and, like, you can teach that to a middle schooler in a day, no need for a thousands of pages-long tome.

It was not worthless. It made a great doorstop.

On that note... Is he really claiming to have invented the Church-Turing Thesis years after their deaths?

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