Hacker News Reader

Comment by syats | Hacker News Reader

Let us concede that in the last 20 years, the number of mentions of "I" in his writing has decreased, and there are more mentions of "We".

As much as a cellular automata, and computation in general, fan as I am, and after having read a fair amount of his work... I am still not convinced that Wolfram is not just a rich crack pot.

View on HN

As rich eccentrics go, I much prefer the ones trying to advance science (like Wolfram) or medicine (like Gates) to the ones just building more superyachts and lobbying corrupt politicians.

I don't really understand the animosity toward Stephen Wolfram on HN - has he done something evil or been super rude to someone? Maybe he has a big ego, but I think that's probably true of a lot of - if not most - of the rich and/or influential people that are discussed on here, whether Bezos, Gates, Jobs, Musk or Stallman. It takes a certain hubris to think you can make a dent in the universe. Why is that if your hubris is to believe you can make a billion dollar startup, HN is all "you go girl!" but if someone wants to do theoretical physics, they really need to check their ego?

I don't know if cellular automata as a foundation of physics will turn out to be a revolution or a dud. I do know that we've been looking for a unified theory of quantum gravity for many decades to no avail. If somebody is motivated to come at the thing from a new perspective, then more power to them. Are they likely to succeed? Of course not, statistically the vast majority of theories don't. But just working to provide new perspectives is a worthwhile goal, and I'm glad he's working on it.

The issue is he makes a bunch of apparently empty claims about his hypergraph stuff being related to physics. The pictures are pretty and the hypergraph stuff is perhaps interesting in its own right, but with all the hand waving about QM and GR, I looked pretty hard a couple of years ago and couldn't find any explanation of the most familiar QM phenomena like the double slit experiment. It's almost like free association. I'd like to see this new theory solve one problem, and by that I don't mean an open research problem. I mean pick any homework problem from an introductory QM course and apply this stuff to it. As Feynman used to say, you have to get the numbers out. As far as I can tell, that hasn't happened.

Even that would prove nothing. Wolfram himself makes a pretty big deal about how cellular automata, being Turing-complete, can model anything. I can give you any number of cellular automata that model our current understanding of quantum physics right now, no problem. It only becomes interesting if it can make different, better predictions than our existing theories.

> I can give you any number of cellular automata that model our current understanding of quantum physics right now, no problem

Ok, I'm interested in seeing something like that. If you have a link, I'll take a look--thanks. (If you're thinking of 't Hooft's, then I know about it, but its predictions are in serious conflict with mainstream physics, from what I understand).

It's not really that interesting. Can you write it in a computer program? Then you can write it in a cellular automata, because many of them are Turing complete:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110#The_proof_of_universa... https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Turing_machine

And yes, this is a cheap trick. That's the point. "Porting" our current theories to some new, whacky substrate, peeking at the textbooks all the while, is Not Interesting and will not lead to new results.

No I don't see how to implement QM as a computer program while preserving basic complexity invariants of Turing machines. That is the point of quantum computing: that the complexity classes for quantum computers are different than those for Turing machines. If you take the view that that the whole Universe is one gigantic entangled quantum state, the cellular automaton simulation would get pretty bogged down.

Quantum Computers are no more powerful than Turing Machines, complexity has little to do with this. Quantum Mechanics, being a linear theory (if we exclude measurement) is actually relatively easy to describe computationally. The computations are incredibly slow, but otherwise they are perfectly in line with any other formulation of the theory.

> Quantum Computers are no more powerful than Turing Machines

They are more powerful in the sense that P-time for quantum computers (aka BQP) is hypothesized to be larger than P-time for Turing machines. That is different from every classical model of computation (RAM machines, etc.) that we usually talk about. It's hard to call something a cellular automaton if it has to expand exponentially in size as it evolves. Thus, 't Hooft concretely predicts that if his CA model is right, then quantum computers can't work. Idk whether Wolfram addresses this issue.

You are conflating multiple unrelated issues.

As using CA like a substrate is clearly "theory free" in the sense it doesn't impose any restrictions on how calculations should be done, do you concede that CA doesn't actually provide any theory as the OP lamented?

...concede it? That was my point...

Wolfram's new physics is based on "hypergraphs", not quite cellular automata, but the point stand that they are an entirely general framework, and therefore useless for the stated purpose.

With the correct initial state, any Turing complete cellular automata (like CGoL) can model any computable system. We can computationally model prevailing quantum models (albeit incredibly slowly), so an unbounded CGoL field would fit the criteria.

> I looked pretty hard a couple of years ago and couldn't find any explanation of the most familiar QM phenomena like the double slit experiment

I was following links from the OP, and while reading his Wolfram Physics one year update[1] I came across this:

https://www.wolframphysics.org/bulletins/2020/08/a-short-not...

[1] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/04/the-wolfram-phys...

Thanks, that helps, I haven't made sense of it yet but at least it shows that the issue isn't being ignored.

> I don't really understand the animosity toward Stephen Wolfram on HN - has he done something evil or been super rude to someone?

He's super rude to pretty much the entire scientific community, by essentially pretending to have invented cellular automata and ignoring everyone else's contributions - even to the point of suppressing them by wielding the legal axe of copyright law:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30941559

To me that reads mostly like the royal "we", as in "We, Stephen Wolfram". Especially when saying things like "Wolfram Research has been geared towards making things we think up into products".

He does have some genuinely good ideas. But they're not reinventing every field of science, technology, and knowledge every few months as his writing would have you believe.

So, smarter than the average crackpot. But not "not a crackpot".

Let him do his thing, he supports many employees for a living, and does meaningful work occassionally. There are many people that are far more problematic for the society than Mr. Wolfram. He hasn't done any harm to anyone. Let him chill in peace.

> He hasn't done any harm to anyone.

Reading posts from former employees and plagiarism accusations (look up Matthew Cook) suggests otherwise.

I remember this being discussed on HN before as well, even though the search function is not bringing up anything.

I worked with Matthew Cook at ETH Zürich after he left wolfram for that reason. Cooks proof of the Turing completeness of the 110 rule [1] is in my opinion the only interesting piece in the new kind of science book. The dispute emerged from wolfram handling this not with science in mind, but capitalism. Putting an NDA on the publication of cook, to frame himself as the source.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110

And what is wrong with that? Most of the internet is filled with poor crack pots, some of them are even here amongst us.

I'd rather be a rich dick than a poor schmuck. Pee into the wind Sir Wolfram, godspeed! Doesn't seem super different to how most grant money is awarded.

Is he a genius or a crackpot? Yes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com