A New Kind of Science: A 15-Year View
I haven&#x27;t read the book, but I&#x27;ve dipped into it. Some of the ideas are interesting; ideas that I was acquainted with through Wolfram&#x27;s papers before the book appeared. From critical examinations published by others, I&#x27;ve gleaned two things: the book contains one new theorem, apparently discovered by one of Wolfram&#x27;s collaborators; and, there are no successful predictions in the book. To the extent that it&#x27;s supposed to be &quot;science&quot;, 15 years later one might hope to see the author saying something like, &quot;Here is my NKS prediction of &lt;whatever&gt;, and this experiment confirms it,&quot; or &quot;this experiment contradicts my prediction.&quot; Even the latter case would show an attempt to do science. So I&#x27;m intensely interested in knowing, from people who have been following this, are there any testable predictions from this NKS, have the experiments been done, and what were the results? Because this new article (I couldn&#x27;t get through it, I confess) seems to be just more handwaving, and Wolfram talking about how important his insights just have to be.<p>EDIT: I meant to add that it&#x27;s very nice that the book is now free, in any case.