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Comment by zelphirkalt | Hacker News Reader

Most of this post seems like maybe a good intro to lambda calculus, but also endless pointless visualization of nesting depth, which makes me wonder what the point of the post is. The probably invented term "ruliology" is not even explained anywhere, and I am not going to jump through all the other posts tagged with that word, to maybe somewhere find a definition of it.

The post would have benefited from explaining what will be found clearly in an initial paragraph, instead of endlessly meandering. As it is now, it feels like wanting to find anything spectacular, but actually finding nothing. Well, except for made up term "ruliology" that is not defined.

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The articles are not necessarily written for a software engineering audience. Going through the lambda calculus would be a necessary prerequisite for the part he actually wants to tell you about at the end. Especially for physicists and mathematicians who primarily study things other than computation.

If you found the visualizations pointless, then you aren't the intended audience. This is a straightforward continuation of his existing research into computation, which started with cellular automata. If you're reading a Wolfram blog, then you're in part coming for the pretty pictures.

> The probably invented term "ruliology" is not even explained anywhere.

The "ruliad" is what he calls the "space of all possible rules" where a rule is like a program that dictates the next state of the system. The ruliad is one of the few rigorous approaches to answering why the laws of physics are the way they are. Stephen's theory is something like "every possible rule for evolving the system is in fact happening, and we are likely to be observing phenomenon that are convergent among more than one rule".

His physics project is a good example of what real physics looks like outside of academia. Stephen is financially independent. He can research whatever he wants and doesn't have to worry about tenure, or sucking up to department heads or people with grant money. Even so, he's not a crank, other physicists understand and engage with what he's doing, and all the math involved is very real.

Stephen Wolfram has done real worthwhile physics. He's an exceptionally smart dude, even if that doesn't come across in some of his writing.

Just to pour some more opinions on the fire, I think he's been descending into crankery slowly, but steadily, since the 80s. Have a sconce at what his output was like before he took m-expressions and built a paywall around them, become a fairly wealthy demigod of science in the process. https://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/all/

The academy (in physics at least), is crusty and traditional, but not to the point of ignoring good work. It's like alternative medicine, do you think if essential oils cured cancer you wouldn't have all the big pharma companies leaping from their high horses?

Wolfram does some cool stuff with cellular automata, and has lots of students doing cool stuff too. What he's not done, neither with NKS nor anything since, is make some contribution to understanding the physical universe that was significant in eyes other than his own.

> The academy (in physics at least), is crusty and traditional, but not to the point of ignoring good work.

I think experimental physics is always looking for theories that explain what they see, but theoretical physics hasn't delivered in the last few decades and the people employed doing theoretical physics have mostly succeeded at a political game, not a scientific one.

> It's like alternative medicine, do you think if essential oils cured cancer you wouldn't have all the big pharma companies leaping from their high horses?

There are effective chemicals offered in Europe that are not offered in the US. Sunblock is better outside the US for example. This is because of pharmaceutical interests and the US regulatory framework (which are really the same thing). If an essential oil cured cancer, I agree that word would get out, but the idea that things that work in any capacity for a specific ailment are automatically adopted by whatever corporation deals in that ailment is just not true.

If basic interventions in public health could widely prevent or improve chronic conditions, would big pharma or big food voluntarily change its business model for the public good?

If wellknown land management practices could cure the decline of soil health, would big ag suddenly change its tune?

I've never been in a physics dept, but the parts of the academy I have seen absolutely would (and do) ignore good work if it's inconvenient or somehow unpalatable. This is of course, though not exclusively, related to the marriage of academy and industry.

No comment on the merit of Wolfram's work.

>would big pharma or big food voluntarily change its business model for the public good?

Insurance companies would, no? They're got every incentive to reduce payments to pharma companies.

if the cure becomes to cheap and widely available, why paying for insurance in the first place?

There is more than one ailment in existence.

Whether or not anything "breakthrough" comes out of his work, I'm very sympathetic to the kinds of explorations he does ... especially since new things go through a messy phase before clarity arises.

> I'm very sympathetic to the kinds of explorations he does

Yes, and I think there is a success criterion that most people are not considering, which is: success as a less complicated explanation for the same phenomenon.

When people ask for new testable predictions as the only way a new theory can be successful, they are revealing that they don't consider parsimonious explanations to be a scientific goal.

Stephen's work with hypergraphs shows a lot of promise as a simple theory that implies other successful theories of physics. It focuses on emergent phenomenon that exhibit "pockets of computational reproducibility". The behavior of those pockets can then be predicted with tools in the physics canon like Riemannian geometry or complex numbers.

> When people ask for new testable predictions as the only way a new theory can be successful, they are revealing that they don't consider parsimonious explanations to be a scientific goal.

It doesn't have to be new testable predictions, but it should at least reproduce some testable predictions of the conventional theories.

As far as I know, these discrete graph models have been shown to reproduce some broad features of QM and GR (mostly the work of Jonathan Gorard rather than Wolfram), but they don't make any actual numerical predictions, which in my view is a basic requirement of a physical theory.

At the moment it seems like some intriguing toy models, similar in many respects to t'Hooft's cellular automaton model of QM, but there's no physical theory here

True, and I always appreciate how he built the wolfram language to allow himself these kinds of explorations, which would be next to impossible without it.

> Even so, he's not a crank, other physicists understand and engage with what he's doing, and all the math involved is very real.

Other physicists engage with his money, I’ll agree to that.

He is a crank, but he’s too wealthy to be ignored by most academic physicists.

I think Stephen is willing to ask really deep questions and then do the work to pursue the answers to completion. Sometimes he’s a little bit long-winded, but he’s frequently coming back with interesting results.

Wolfram has named his concept of the 'the universe is a program' the 'ruliad' and calls the study of it 'ruliology'. He has been using these terms and explaining them - in his long rambling way - for the last few years.

Surprised he didn't call it wolframology

A New Kind of Ology

20 Years of a New Kind of Ology, even

https://wolframinstitute.org/research/ruliology

> Ruliology [...] examines how simple computational rules can generate complex behaviors.

Sounds like emergence.

It feels to me like someone who is managing their own existential needs. To make a mark. To have done important works. But it always comes off as unauthentic. It is amusing considering how good things like Mathematica and many of his less bloviating thoughts were. Wolfram Alpha was also very useful in the times before the LLM.

I find his obsession with a computable universe a little off-putting. I guess if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail....

He manages to make himself the actual subject of everything he writes. When I saw the author’s name, I knew the article would make sure to fluff up his own ego, and it took him less than a paragraph to get there.

He's insufferable, but I'll take his variation on the theme of "narcissistic billionaire" over most of the others we're currently forced to share the planet with, any day of the week.

It's not just his ego though, it's the way his ego clashes with other egos of internet commenters. Why do so many people feel the need to comment that they already knew Wolfram would write about himself and then confirm that it is indeed so? If you can predict it so well and you don't like it, you could just ignore it. But somehow it triggers people even knowing that he exists and they can't let it go.

I like the lambda calculus and I was intrigued by the title, so I gave the article a shot. Hope springs eternal.

Counterpoint: I actually really enjoy his style of writing, which I find clear, patient (you must appreciate visual examples and exploration though) and very often challenging and stimulating (recent examples: the posts about the bigger brains, Conway GoL engineering, and biology / evolution). I find he regularly introduces intriguing and useful ideas, like the distinction between "brain-like" computers (which includes neural networks) and more general, Turing-like mechanisms, and I find his overarching concept of computational irreducibility (even though he didn't invent it) quite profound in its implications. I would add that his posts read like an ambitious research program in progress (like a book written one chapter at a time) and that is why I think certain concepts (like ruliology) may appear obscure at first, if you didn't read a lot of stuff that comes before. One tiny nitpick I have: certain language tics, like the constant use of the "And, yes" pattern (he really uses this a lot I wish someone somehow told him).

I agree. I usually find his posts illuminating. Sure, they’re verbose and self-aggrandizing, but there are way more writers out there online that are also self-aggrandizing but offer no original content or value. Also the rambling style presents a more realistic view of how scientific exploration works than a distilled down paper missing crucial details needed for replication (I’m looking at you ML/AI).

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