He’s going to talk about three components of the New Kind of Science (NKS) enterprise: Pure NKS, applied NKS and the NKS way of thinking. [I’m live-blogging and don’t have time for quote marks.]

The intellectual core of pure NKS means asking the abstract question: What sort of simple programs are there and what do they do? It’s an independent area of intellectual inquiry that one day will be viewed as a discipline like physics and mathematics. It’s topic: the computational world.

The pure science might not have any applications but what’s been driving it is the hope that it does. Applied NKS takes what we learn from pure NKS and use it to model elements of nature, and even to human organizations.

The NKS way of thinking extends this to philosophy and art. NKS may not provide a model for human organization but it may provide a way of thinking about human organization. Also education.

“In order for NKS to realized its potential, it’s absolutely crucial that the pure NKS be properly developed.” A danger is that pure cores get left behind because of the excitement about applications.

The core has a simple story: One day it should be like physics and math with its own questions and methods and thhat is recognized as its own thing that gets to define its own boundaries.

It’s also important that NKS be embedded in other sciences. That’s the only way applications will happen. So, while Pure NKS should be its own field, the applications should not spring from a separate and distinct NKS.

You’d think that sciences are defined by their subject matter, e.g., biology is defined as the study of all living things. In fact, they’re defined by their methodologies. The questions they ask are the ones answerable by their methodologies. [Very Kuhn-ian. But it also fits with Wolfram’s attempt to explain the universe purely through formal terms; subject matter doesn’t count any more than a mathematician cares whether you’re adding apples or oranges.] NKS needs to be implanted through real practitioners, although the questions NKS asks are different. NKS enables some tough questions in these fields to be answered. [Pure Kuhn: new paradigms grow in part in response to anomalies in existing paradigms. Wolfram knows his Kuhn.] In this way NKS is similar to mathematics.

Is there a general applications layer between the pure NKS and applied NKS? Yes, sort of. But it’d be a mistake to focus on that layer instead of focusing on particular application areas. Unlike philosophy, when NKS goes into an application area, it has lots of clear things to say, whereas philosophy has trouble moving from the pure to the applied with any clarity.

How do you confirm the rightness of NKS? Pure NKS simply wants to explore the computational world and see what’s out there. Whether that’s worth doing can’t be judged by the applications. The principle of computational equivalence, however, is an exception within pure NKS because there are predictions that can be made and it is falsifiable, but Wolfram’s not going to talk about this tomorrow. [Damn! I’m only here for the one day!] But in general, pure NKS is like math in terms of its justification. With applied NKS, it works like physics and other sciences: you see if you’re explaining stuff. By the way, when NKS is applied it generally works on more complex problems than the traditional sciences can handle. [He means “complex” in the complexity theory way, e.g., turbulence.]

Are there technologies that arise from applied NKS? Sure, particularly and obviously around computer technology.

History of NKS So Far

It was satisfying that the initial print run of 50,000 of A New Kind of Science sold out in one day. He’s planted the ideas by writing the book, lecturing, etc. But beyond that, how do ideas get introduced into the world? Let’s look at previous paradigm shifts.

There are typical responses: It’s wrong, it’s been done before, and it doesn’t make any sense.

But it’s hard to quickly say that NKS is wrong because there’s a lot in it. And it’s been done before is a denial based on the need to connect what one is doing with what one’s done before. And it seems like it doesn’t make sense because it’s different from what’s gone before. [Wolfram’s reply to the “It’s been done before” objection was weak, I thought. Better to say that it builds on what’s been done but is new in important ways.]

The reaction against NKS shows that it’s being taken seriously. I had viewed science as a less emotionally-involved enterprise … [audience laughs knowingly]

He’s been flooded with emails, etc. His site’s guestbook shows that the visitors come first from the physical sciences and then from mathematics. The most frequent request is for software that will let people do their own experiments. NKS Explorer enables this. [Does it require Mathematica?]

About 50 papers have come out that refer to NKS. They almost uniformly cover the chapters of the book.

He’s handed out a booklet of “Open Problems and Projects.” Most have to do with pure NKS issues, but he’s continuing to work on this and will post on his site open questions in the applications area as well.

He’s been building an “atlas” of what’s out there in the computational world. It’s available on his website. The “Wolfram Atlas” is repository of information. It enables people interested in pure NKS to meet, sort of an experiment in Open Source science. There will probably soon be an online forum for discussing NKS. They haven’t done that yet because they wanted to wait for the furor to die down so that a reasonable discussion can be held.

Application areas he’s particularly interested in:

He wants there to be survey articles in various fields to show the activity around NKS. He’s very interested in how the idea NKS can be used in schools. He’d like somehow to incubate 50 pure NKS professors in order to seed academia; he’s running a summer school as a start. He’s found the best reaction among those at the beginning of their careers and those who are near the end; those in the middle have too much invested in what they’re currently doing. He believes that there will be some dramatic applications that will help people understand what NKS is about.

Categories: misc dw