Turing seems to be sort of a personal hero to Wolfram, so I'm sure that he'd have some interest in the results in the post.

And for anyone interested in modeling nature with computers more generally, A New Kind of Science is wonderful reading and gives a great conceptual framework on how to go about it. It's sad that the Shalizi review is the first thing people refer to (it's sort of the Huffington Post of reviews).

This was how I thought before I read any reviews or heard anything other than laudatory things about Wolfram. Until I read the reviews I thought there might be something terribly wrong with my understanding of what I just read.

Do you base this on just this one review, or more generally? I've mostly found his reviews informative and much better researched than most online reviews. They have opinions, but the opinions are more informative to me than "I like this" or "I don't like this". I usually feel that I learn something from the reviews, including finding new books and articles to read because they're cited in the review. That's not exactly something that happens at HuffPo.

Anyway, the history of cellular automata is sort of interesting, and the notion of using computation to explain biological markings is also interesting. Thought after skimming Turing's paper it looks like while Turing makes many simplifying assumptions, did some basic computer modeling, and is literally about biological cells, his model is not as abstract as the cellular automata von Neumann, Conway, or Wolfram studied--unlike the others Turing's model uses linear equations to transmit "state" from cell to cell instead of rules. In fact Wolfram's contribution was to remove as many details as possible from cellular automata, enumerate all the possibilities, and observe what happens.

The bummer about referring to that review in other threads or in this case mischaracterizing Wolfram's work is that it distracts from creating more interesting discussions about this stuff. There are currently about 16 comments effectively discussing attribution, and precious few about what sort of model Turing proposed.

My personal single biggest objection, though, is that the review appears to be used as a sort of conversation-ending trump card, usually posted with very little comment, sort of like you might see from a fan of talk radio posting in a newspaper comment section.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cscs.umich.edu%2F...

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fvserver1.cscs.lsa.umi...

It's about as bad as bringing up Wolfram's ego--the consequent discussion never leads to anything interesting. Witness this thread that marktangotango started. I don't believe he was being malicious, but it's clear that rather than start a discussion about cellular automata like he intended it spawned a wasteland thread about attribution.

Why must we talk about TMZ-level bullshit when we could be talking about Turing's paper and the original paper in the post? Why is that discussion losing out to gossip?