noleander

Dr. Wolfram, you wrote a book called A New Kind of Science.

Many critics claimed it overhyped the principles that were stated in the book... specifically that the automata were not as powerful or as revolutionary as you claimed. You're were also criticized for being too egotistical and not giving enough credit to others who research similar ideas before you.

Looking back, do you feel that the book was overly ambitious, and promoted the automata principles too eagerly? Do you wish you had been more humble in the way you wrote the book?

(Edit: corrected the name is the book. )

Hmmmm. That seems non-responsive. The question was whether you think the criticisms were valid.

Since you did not answer the question, I can presume that you think the criticisms are not valid. You think you are not especially arrogant, and you think the claims in the book are not overhyped.

Yeah, I read the New Kind of Science book when it first came out, and I was astonished at the use of "I" "me" "mine" in the book. Smart guy, but very self-centered.

In his reply to my post above, he writes "It's really neat to see the ideas in my book become mainstream" ... which means he thinks that his book proposed new ideas that were adopted by AI researchers around the world. Apparently he thinks that the machine-learning being used for data analysis these days is all based on his cellular automata theory.

And, of course, he re-named the "Mathematica" programming language to be named after himself: "Wolfram" language.

I think that after he dies, he'll be quickly forgotten.

Oops! Thanks for the correction. I fixed my original post.