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>>Go get the brand new (and hot selling) book by Stephen Wolfram caleld "A new kind of science". He takes cellular automata and runs with it, posing new ideas for randomness, free will, evolution, and the universe in general. Should be interesting.
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>>We should both read this book, come back, and discuss. Anyone else hear of the book?
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> Yeah, I've gotten it - it was my Christmas present last year ;-). Of course, it only took another year and a half before I actually got it. I'm only up to chapter three; it's a huge book. I'm anxious to make a little more progress in it since I think he's just laying the groundwork for his ideas presented in later chapters (that is, it's slow going early on).


"A New Kind Of Science" was announced as available the 'Summer of 2002", and was finally released for sale on May 14, 2002.
You must know Wolfram personally, to receive a copy 6 months before its release.


Someone wrote the following comment on the Amazon site:
"The basic idea that complexity can be obtained by very simple rules is not new. The idea that the Universe, in all its complexity, may be a result of very simple (computational) rules is not new. And looking at lots (and I mean *lots*) of fractal-like, cellular automata, game of life like, black and white pictures is no fun at all. The pictures tell you nothing. You need to understand the text to understand the pictures. But if you understand the text, you don't really need the pictures. (A few pictures would be o.k., but hundreds is not good.)
I think the basic info in this book, the basic theme, could be written in under 100 pages. This is not a "how to" book. It doesn't tell you how to replace current math, physics, etc. with something new. It only suggests that it might be possible to do so by considering "it all" as computation and by finding/defining simple computable systems."

(Visit Wolfram's site and preview the sample pages to get an idea of the shear density of the book. What the above comment could have added was that the book was an 1197 page advertisement for Mathematica.)

Here is a simple explaination of the Mandelbrodt Set, Fractals and the concept of recursion.
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~lib175/projects_fall_2000/chew

Like the comment given above, to call playing around with the values of 'c' in an iteration a "new kind of science" is to elevate the process of computations to the status of 'laws' of nature. When we stop husbanding cattle and start worshipping Gold plated images of them .....