>>13097012I don't like wolfram personally, but this is the worst critique of his work I've ever seen. It's as if you've only ever read his stuff through the testimony of other people, wtf.
His main discovery is that a simple 1 dimensional cellular automata whose rules arechosenat random will have a finite not so small probability of being a full computer (in his system, 2 of the 128 possibilities). Before cook's proof that the system wolfram found, rule 110, is actually a full computer, it was implicitly assumed that to get a certain amount of complexity, you had to put in complexity by hand. This result is also present in conway's system, but Wolfram's work is somewhat complementary, because the information flows in 1d systems make it more difficult to imagine a full computer emerging. The fact that it does anyway (although, as cook's construction shows, with horrible running times, because of the difficulty of shuttling information long distances) is surprising and notable.
