Eric Cordian wrote: > Steve Schear writes: > > >>Stephen Wolfram's book, "A New Kind of Science," is nothing if not >>interesting. This encyclopedia-sized volume traces how his fascination >>with cellular automata, beginning in the 1970s, led him to spend decades >>exploring the significance of complexity created from simple rules. > > > I bought a copy the day it came out. It's an interesting read, but as far > as I can tell, contains nothing of startling import. It contains not a > single proof. It merely suggests that Cellular Automata are sufficiently > rich to model any physical process, and maybe someone, someday, will use > them for that purpose. > > Then again, so are Turing Machines.
Conway proved long ago that cellular automata can model Turing machines (see "Winning Ways", Berlekamp, Guy and Conway (in some order I forget) for the proof - and many other amusing distractions). Cheers, Ben. -- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.thebunker.net/ "There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff