There's a nice article about Wolfram (different link) in a June 2002 Wired Mag article here. Fascinating reading, well written article. I made the mistake of starting the article at the wrong time last week and was very late for a meeting.
The book, A New Kind of Science, has a fairly expansive web site is here.
A quote from Wolfram:
"What started my work on A New Kind of Science are the discoveries I made about what simple computer programs can do. One might have thought that if a program was simple it should only do simple things. But amazingly enough, that isn't even close to correct. And in fact what I've discovered is that some of the very simplest imaginable computer programs can do things as complex as anything in our whole universe. It's this point that seems to be the secret that's used all over nature to produce the complex and intricate things we see. And understanding this point seems to be the key to a whole new way of thinking about a lot of very fundamental questions in science and elsewhere. And that's what I develop in A New Kind of Science."
- from http://www.wolframscience.com/qanda/
From a Newsweek article:
"Wolfram’s fierce independence, along with his chronically low opinion of the establishment, led him to a 10-year descent into solitude, from which he emerged only last week with a phone-book-size tome, “A New Kind of Science,”...
Frankly, I can't wait to read it, at least the parts I'll be able to understand. Apparently there is quite a bit in the book that is digestible by the rest of us...
I was worried that Wolfram had seen some of my Perl code - often a single line of code produces the most complex, and unanticipated, results. ;) Truly an example of 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions' and the butterfly effect rolled into one line...
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