On 2 November 2010 02:17, rjf <fate...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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.
It would be rather embarrising for Steven Wolfram if Sage could do the stuff in Mathematica 1000x faster. > Their importance in Mathematica per se is probably for curiosity. No > applications except as a random number generator. Well, there are a number of things for which no applications currently exist, but are useful from a theoretical point of view. Several seem to think the fact Steven Wolfram's rule 110 is Turing complete, i.e., capable of universal computation, is important. > Almost without exception, the reviews by technical experts of > Wolfram's NKS were in > the range from hostile to merely negative. My own thoughts, for what they are worth are: * His excessive use of the word "I" was really irritating. * Several people have pointed out that a lot of what he claims is his own were worked out long before him. * Excessively verbose * An excessive number of rather boring diagrams. * An overly exagerated claim of the importance of his work. * His boast that he sat down for a decade and worked on his own, whilst ignoring what others were doing, seems ones of stupidity rather than good science. I'm aware of someone who posts on sci.math.symbolic who done some interesting work, yet he had no access to any libraries or the internet for decades, due to the contruy he lived in. Given his circumstances, I can understand if some of his work is not new. But Wolfram seems to not have looked at the literature, which seems rather stupid to me. > You can bet that if there were significant applications, there would > be > support for CA in Matlab. MATLAB seems to be aimed at solving practical science/engineering problems, rather than theoretical issues like Turing machines. So it's no surprise to me that MATLAB does not have this. > There's no particular downside in including CA stuff in Sage; just > speculation that something > more useful could be done by "Hypercube" instead. "Hypercube" said Cellular automata have proved to be a useful tool for modeling discrete systems in various applications, so he thought it could be useful to a wide scope of researchers. I've got no idea how true that claim is, but if true it would suggest it would be useful in Sage. If Sage is ever to become a viable alternative to Mathematica, then it really needs the features of that program. That said, I would tend to think Sage lacks more important things. IMHO, the fact Sage can't read data from laboratory test instruments and plot it in real time like MATLAB is far more of an omission than the lack of CA support. But if "Hypercube" is interested in CAs, and not in reading data from lab instruments, there's no point in him working on the latter. Dave -- 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
