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Wednesday's discussion

By Doug Blank
January 24, 2006 - 00:40
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Emergence 361
On Wednesday, we will change directions a bit and head directly to computer modeling. There are two readings posted on the schedule for Wednesday: first, take a look at the first two chapters of Stephen Wolfram's "New Kind of Science." Second, look over the pages on "Python 1D CA". The "Python 1D CA" will probably be not enough detail for some of you, and too much detail for another some of you. Keep in mind that we have a very diverse group. I hope that everyone in the class will have their accounts soon, and you can try out the experiments. If you are following along our blog, all of the software that we will use in this course is freely available, so you can download it and follow along. And everyone is welcome to comment here.

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AngadSingh's picture

Submitted by AngadSingh on January 25, 2006 - 10:13

Just an amusing aside from Wikipedia... "...This result therefore provides significant support for Wolfram's view that class 4 systems are inherently likely to be universal. Cook presented his proof at a Santa Fe Institute conference on Cellular Automata in 1998, but Wolfram blocked the proof from being included in the conference proceedings, as Wolfram did not want the proof to be published before the publication of A New Kind of Science. In 2004, Cook's proof was finally published in Wolfram's journal Complex Systems (Vol. 15, No. 1), over ten years after Cook came up with it." Wolfram seems to be a bit heavy-handed at times...and apparently owns his own media conglomerate