Cellular automata of the sort that Wolfram talks about can be implemented in languages other than Mathematica much more efficiently. Maybe 10,000 times faster when I wrote some stuff in lisp. Not for doing anything useful, just a speed competition.
Their importance in Mathematica per se is probably for curiosity. No applications except as a random number generator. Almost without exception, the reviews by technical experts of Wolfram's NKS were in the range from hostile to merely negative. You can bet that if there were significant applications, there would be support for CA in Matlab. There's no particular downside in including CA stuff in Sage; just speculation that something more useful could be done by "Hypercube" instead. On Nov 1, 5:08 pm, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 3:55 PM, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > > On 1 November 2010 22:21, Hypercube <eviatarb...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> Cellular automata have proved to be a useful tool for modelling > >> discrete systems in various applications, so I think it could be > >> useful to a wide scope of researchers. At least "A New Kind of > >> Science" seems to have brought it out of its niche, partially. > > > I don't know how many copies were sold, but there are several hundred > > reviews of his book, so it makes me think there would be interest in > > this. > > > That said, I expect a lot of the people that bought the book have > > never read it in full. I think it can be useful for insomnia. > > >> However, I think the main reason why it's so prominent in Mathematica > >> is because of Wolfram's interest in it. > > > Yes, that is most certainly true. I doubt it would have the prominence > > it does if it was not for Steven Wolfram's interest. > > >> MATLAB doesn't have native > >> support for CAs, for example. I don't think it would hurt to have it > >> in Sage though. > > > MATLAB is aimed at quite a different set of users to Mathematica. But > > there are several files in the file exchange area that are related. > > >http://www.mathworks.co.uk/matlabcentral/fileexchange/?term=tag%3A%22... > > > So I think it would be worth adding in Sage. > > I just want to second David's opinion that this is worth adding to > Sage. Generally speaking, *anything* that is a nontrivial part of any > of the standard distributions of Maple, Magma, Matlab, and Mathematica > is well worth including in Sage, given the goal of Sage being a viable > alternative to the Ma's. This means at least being able to do what > they do, "out of the box". > > -- William > > -- > William Stein > Professor of Mathematics > University of Washingtonhttp://wstein.org -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
