Every mention of Stephen Wolfram deserves a link to Cosma Shalizi's epic take-down of a review ("A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity"): http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

What an amazing review-Thanks for that. It really brings together a lot of sad threads in my mind from that time. Having been the kind of guy who waited patiently for hours for home-made CAs to wiggle about on my VGA monitor and/or wrote little artificial life simulations etc for years in lonely isolation I bought "A New Kind of Science" with great expectation when it was in huge piles in every bookshop and was kind of devastated by how empty it was. I had really hoped for so much.