Reading Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science." Kept getting uncomfortable because the book is so heavy. Ended up lying on my back with the book on my chest, but then got a crick in my neck and it was hard to turn the pages.

The guy spent 5 years writing software that runs cellular automata sequences, and another 10 years analyzing the results in a "naturalist" style investigatory mode. As far as I can tell the book has one big idea, which is that complex patterns can arise from very simple rules, and that making those rules more complex doesn't lead to more complex patterns.

My reaction so far to the above is "so what." However I did find two other ideas I liked so far. One is the analogy between free will and Pi, in that both can be viewed as irreducible equations. That is, one can calculate Pi, but one can never predict what a more precise value of Pi will be without actually calculating it. In life, one's behavior arises from a set of pre-existing conditions and is thus potentially calcuable, but you can never precisely predict human behavior into the future. The human being in questions has to do the calculation in realtime, ie live life/make decisions/exercise free will. Ok a bit loose as an analogy but I like it.

The other idea I like (and I've only briefly skimmed the book so far) is that many forms in nature arise not from mutation and natural selection, but from the application of simple geometric laws and constraints. He makes an example of some fifty or so mollusc shell patterns that can be generated using simple geometric building rules, and then shows pictures of almost all of the exact same patterns in actual real mollusc shells. He shows a similar example with leaves. This seems to be convincing support for the argument that natural selection is less of a creative force than simple geometric rules. The only things that bugs me about this idea is that I seem to remember Richard Dawkins also wrote a computer program and published a book along the same lines, and Wolfram makes no mention of him (I just checked the gigantic index).

So it popped into my mind that I would like to see what would happen if some of these algorithms were run in 4+ dimensions ... what would the 3D sectionals look like? Maybe he gets to this but I haven't covered it yet.

I think I'll make another batch of plum jelly today. I'll use the blender technique to get more of the skins in without it getting pulpy. Then some studio time.