http://tones.wolfram.com/

The science behind this is just amazing!

Is that sarcasm?

Cellular automata are fun and quite deep and interesting from a theoretical perspective but, unfortunately, Wolfram's so-called NKS is a little bit lacking with respect to some of the more scientific points. I'd go into more detail, but I've heard some horror stories, so I'm sure you can find more information elsewhere.

It's really interesting though because Wolfram's early work on CA (with some exceptions like early assertions regarding universality and his class system vs Langton's lambda parameter) was quite pioneering and useful. Now, it almost seems more like he's trying to sell his CA toys to the mass market and popularize his ideas that way rather than go back to the math and theory and publish some new results. There's been the press conferences, and the visual art thing, and now this.

Anyway, as a fan of all kinds of CA stuff (and having programmed various types of CA simulators recently), this music thing is sort of cool. But I'm not sure that it's really anything special from the scientific or even technical side of things. I've seen much more ingenious and advanced artificial music generation systems before elsewhere.

It is not sarcasm, I think more or less like you. I researched on fractals years ago, also on CA and now I only remember the principles behind all this. I really think that this sciece explains a lot of growing patterns seen in the nature. The simplest solution is the best in most cases.

It is funny how you can hear melodies created this way, but I was reffering to the science, not to the website and the commercial thing. I think that it is just a way to get some money from his old discoveries.

Regards,
Oki

I first read about wolfram's automata in a book on evolutionary psychology, some 15 years back. It was a revelation to me, the generation of apparently complex behaviour based on simple mixing and matching of rules.
But his present exercise of publicity mongering truly doesn't behove. Notwithstanding the fact that the tones are "kewl"
edit: cellular automata were there before wolfram. Regarding evolution - I would refer intersted people to Matt Ridley's "Origin of Virtue". Do a google on cellular automata and Conway's Game of Life

Sure. The relationship between emergent complexity seen in nature through the recursive application of simple rules and the fundamental concepts behind computation are what originally drew me to research CA and certain related fields.

A good book to introduce people to this kind of thinking -- although sometimes a tiny bit lacking and/or slightly incorrect/oversimplified on some of the more advanced technical matters -- is Flake's The Computational Beauty of Nature. It covers fractals, lindenmayer systems, complex adaptive systems, non-linear dynamics, computation, cellular automata, and a few other topics in a pretty brief introductory style designed to get people interested. It has some coding related material too. You can find a review on Cosma Shalizi's excellent site here: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/c...auty-of-nature/

Yep.

I believe the first well known "scientific" study of cellular automata (which have probably been studied by earlier mathematicians under slightly different abstractions/names/methods) was probably from Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann in sometime around the 1950's.

John von Neumann was trying to build a self-replicating machine called the "Kinematon" (sp?). Since the engineering technology for robotics and electronics were not sufficiently advanced in those days to realize his machine, he talked to Ulam about it who suggested trying to realize his machine in a simplified virtual universe which harbored only a few laws in the form of simple mathematical rules that he could apply to discrete "units" of it to decide on state changes for given time steps.

At any rate, von Neumann eventually did create this machine in the form of what we now call cellular automata, although his implementation was quite a bit more complex than current simplified versions of self-reproducing automata like the Langton Loop and the Evoloop (you can find some animations of these things here).

As for Wolfram, I can't remember if his early work on CA predated Conway's Game of Life or not. But, he definitely was one of the few people at that time who was interested in continuing Neumann's scientific study of cellular automata. He wrote quite a bit of good papers on the theoretical aspects of CA, and created the binary numbering system for representing the rules of a 1-dimensional cellular automata with immediate single cell width neighborhoods, as well as doing some work on distinguishing and highlighting certain more general properties of groups of automata.

After he left academia to develop Mathematica and work on writing NKS, in addition to applying for patents on certain cellular automata (which he apparently achieved for lattice gas ), his contribution to the traditional scientific community pretty much ground to a halt. And despite Wolfram Research press releases claiming otherwise, for the most part I believe most scientists do not feel that he has rejoined them.