He didn’t set out for it, but this man is simply a genius.
It is quite possible by his examples that the universe is unable to be reducible and replicated from the reduced back into the macro because of the same issue that he found in his computational equations which are incredibly simple; to create their complex and nearly random products, they have to be held as irreducible beyond the scale that accomplishes the macro form.
Or rather, if you took the macro form of some of these products and tried to deduce the first micro formula that causes it to be the way that it is, then the formula you would arrive at, when ran forwards, would not accomplish the same final product because you would have the wrong simple formula for creating the macro form since the final form is irreducible as what it is below that level of complexity; yet still…a simple formula does actually exist below it; you just can’t deduce it in such a manner.
Equally, if you start on the micro level, near the actual generating equation’s base level, and arrive at a formula for what causes the micro products and then again did the same separately on the macro level of one of these more complicated products, then they would not merge, but both would appear to be correct to what they were measuring and predicting.
I loaded Mathmatica on my system some time back with hopes that it might be of assistance with my own creation simulator. I found it to be merely another sequencing game much like John Conway’s Game of Life. You put in a pattern and like a fractal generator, it repeats a sequence to see where it leads; “Oh wow, look what happens in step 30! Cool.”. It is a bit like a “shot in the dark” approach to figuring out how life or the universe began.
I understand the universe as having only one rule or law, so these games wherein you think up a set of rules to see where they lead is a bit of a waste from my perspective. You only need one rule.
He claimed in that presentation things that he provided absolutely no evidence toward. His “Alpha” appeared to be no more than a mere search engine showing no indication of intelligence beyond the normal for such machines. He provided no evidence to the contrary. The idea of a thinking machine that develops its own solutions to problems is old. Even I have done that much.
The more I see of Stephen Wolfram, the more I believe him to be just another modern day entrepreneurial shill for newage scientism.
It does appear like a search engine; the difference is that aside from standard facts that are produced, it also computes answers.
He was pretty clear on that; for instance, his example of the space station trajectory and location was calculated by the program; not listed from static data.
And while the work seems novel to you; the ability to get a computer to move in form and function computationally in such manners as he’s doing is anything but snake oil sales.
He’s not really out to answer the universal issues of physics.
He’s a computational programmer that noticed some things along the way.
His primary interest is in creating more robust computational systems that are able to “think” portions of their responses rather than just recall answers from closed or open libraries.
Working on replicating pattern computations is his approach to getting machines to “think” or “logic” a problem.