Ruliology provides a powerful descriptive framework - a taxonomy of computational behavior. However, it operates at the level of external dynamics without grounding in a primitive ontology. It tells us that rules behave, not why they exist or what they fundamentally are.
This makes ruliology an invaluable cartography of the computational landscape, but not a foundation. It maps the territory without explaining what the territory is made of.
PaulRobinson 1 hours ago [-]
I actually think this is just computer science. Why? Because the first "computer scientist" - Alan Turing - was interested in this exact same set of ideas.
The first programs he wrote for the Atlas and the Mark II ("the Baby"), seem to have been focused on a theory he had around how animals got their markings.
They look a little to me (as a non-expert in these areas, and reading them in a museum over about 15 minutes, not doing a deep analysis), like a primitive form of cellular automata algorithm. From the scrawls on the print outs, it's possible that he was playing with the space of algorithms not just the algorithms themselves.
It might be worth going back and looking at that early work he did and seeing it through this lens.
The idea iiuc, is that pattern formation in animals depends on molecules diffusing through the growing system (the body) and reacting where the waves of molecules overlap.
oulipo2 14 minutes ago [-]
Alan Turing is FAR from the first computer scientist, though, if we want to be pedantic
SideburnsOfDoom 40 minutes ago [-]
Right. is "the basic science of what simple rules do" not the same as Formal systems?
But exactly what is the problem here? Other than perhaps a very mechanical view of the universe (which he shares with many other authors) where it is hard to explain things like consciousness and other complex behaviors.
jacquesm 56 minutes ago [-]
With Wolfram it is usually the grandstanding and taking credit for other people's work. Inventing new words for old things is part and parcel of that. He has a lot in common with Schmidhuber, both are arguably very smart people but the fact that other people can be just as smart doesn't seem to fit their worldview.
gritspants 36 minutes ago [-]
He may be smarter than I am, but I'm smart enough to tell that he's not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.
chvid 2 hours ago [-]
I am struggling to understand what is new here - other than the word ruliad - which to me seems to similar to what we have in theoretical computer science when we talk about languages, sentences, and grammars.
elric 1 hours ago [-]
It's just Wolfram explaining how he likes stuying things that can be describe by simple rules and how complexity can emerge in spite of (or because of?) the seeming simplicity of those rules. He came up with a word for it, and while I think "ruliology" sounds a bit silly, it does say what's on the tin.
But maybe it is more like fractals and emerging complex systems?
36 minutes ago [-]
meghanto 2 hours ago [-]
This looks very exciting but wolfram language being paywalled makes me super sad I can't play around with it
ForceBru 2 hours ago [-]
The Wolfram Engine (essentially the Wolfram Language interpreter/execution environment) is free: https://www.wolfram.com/engine/. You can download it and run Wolfram code.
he invented the term and so pleased its blowing up.
deepsun 3 hours ago [-]
Amount of "I" and "me" is astonishing.
Didn't find anything on falsifiable criteria -- any new theory should be able, at least in theory, to be tested for being not true.
ForceBru 2 hours ago [-]
Isn't this his personal blog? The domain name is "stephenwolfram.com", this is his personal website. Of course there will be "I"'s and "me"'s — this website is about him and what he does.
As for falsifiability:
> You have some particular kind of rule. And it looks as if it’s only going to behave in some particular way. But no, eventually you find a case where it does something completely different, and unexpected.
So I guess to falsify a theory about some rule you just have to run the rule long enough to see something the theory doesn't predict.
uwagar 1 hours ago [-]
he be the trump of his new kinda science world.
SanjayMehta 2 hours ago [-]
That's his style. It's not just his blog style, it's the same in his book.
This makes ruliology an invaluable cartography of the computational landscape, but not a foundation. It maps the territory without explaining what the territory is made of.
The first programs he wrote for the Atlas and the Mark II ("the Baby"), seem to have been focused on a theory he had around how animals got their markings.
They look a little to me (as a non-expert in these areas, and reading them in a museum over about 15 minutes, not doing a deep analysis), like a primitive form of cellular automata algorithm. From the scrawls on the print outs, it's possible that he was playing with the space of algorithms not just the algorithms themselves.
It might be worth going back and looking at that early work he did and seeing it through this lens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction%E2%80%93diffusion_sys...
The idea iiuc, is that pattern formation in animals depends on molecules diffusing through the growing system (the body) and reacting where the waves of molecules overlap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science
But exactly what is the problem here? Other than perhaps a very mechanical view of the universe (which he shares with many other authors) where it is hard to explain things like consciousness and other complex behaviors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy
But maybe it is more like fractals and emerging complex systems?
Wolfram Mathematica (the Jupyter Notebook-like development environment) is paid, but there are free and open source alternatives like https://github.com/WLJSTeam/wolfram-js-frontend.
> WLJS Notebook ... [is] A lightweight, cross-platform alternative to Mathematica, built using open-source tools and the free Wolfram Engine.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/
Didn't find anything on falsifiable criteria -- any new theory should be able, at least in theory, to be tested for being not true.
As for falsifiability:
> You have some particular kind of rule. And it looks as if it’s only going to behave in some particular way. But no, eventually you find a case where it does something completely different, and unexpected.
So I guess to falsify a theory about some rule you just have to run the rule long enough to see something the theory doesn't predict.
https://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200207/stephen_wolframs_unfor...