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Comment by marktangotango | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to note that Turing, Von Nueman, and Konrad Zuse all moved into studying cellular automata in their later years. Conway is famous for his game of life, but but Turings work consisted of this morphogensis thing, and Von Nueman created a self replicating automata. I don't recall what Zuse's work consisted of. Also interesting, Wolfram mentions none of their work in his book, "A New Kind of Science".

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Zuse wrote Calculating Space: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_Space

He couldn't give a single shout out? Considering what a behemoth that book is, that's just poor form!

marktangotango is lying, and almost certainly deliberately. See my sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7451765.

ummm... that's kind of a leap of logic. Maybe he just made a simple mistake? Why would someone lie about references in computer science book?

How could that be a "simple mistake"? Either the commenter has read the book, in which case such a lapse in memory is inexcusable in the face of such a strong statement of the book's contents, or the commenter has not read the book or even quickly searched its contents, in which case the lie is the result of deliberate ignorance.

If I claimed that the Lord of the Rings trilogy does not contain a character named "Frodo," would you call that a deliberate lie or a simple mistake?

If I claimed that the Lord of the Rings trilogy does not contain a character named "Frodo," would you call that a deliberate lie or a simple mistake?

I'd call it neither.

You'd be wrong, but maybe you were confusing the name, or maybe the book, or maybe it's spelt differently in a different language. Maybe you read it long ago and forgot. Maybe you read a printing done by a little known cult that censored all referenced to hobbits. I have no idea why, but there are an infinite field of possibilities and only some require bad faith.

Or maybe your cat skipped across the keyboard and just happened to type out those exact characters and submit the comment. Fair enough. However, when I read a comment, I tend to infer that it was made intentionally by a human, and that the human intends to claim that the contents of the comment are correct.

the human intends to claim that the contents of the comment are correct

Sure. But I think it is inadvisable to claim to know the reasons or motive behind the comment, and doubly so to claim they are acting in bad faith.

Why do you say deliberately? I don't mean to provoke this thread, but you've made a pretty strong accusation, and you need to either provide evidence, or an apology.

I say deliberately, because it is so specific and so easy to verify. Either the commenter has read the book, in which case such a strong statement could only be confidently made if paired with an extraordinarily bad memory, or the commenter has not read the book (or done a quick search to see if the book contains these references), in which case I consider the lie to be the result of deliberate ignorance.

> in which case I consider the lie to be the result of deliberate ignorance.

It's not a lie, if it is the result of ignorance.

I'm not even sure what "deliberate ignorance" means in this context: he knowingly doesn't know if Wolfram mentioned this, and guessing he probably did, chooses to say he didn't?

Yes. If he knows that he has never read the book and thus doesn't know what is and isn't in it, then I would consider it a deliberate lie to make a confident claim about the contents of the book.

At this point, it's a facile criticism to say that Wolfram doesn't give enough credit to others. Many people have complained about this.

marktangotango extrapolated this trope to assuming that Wolfram doesn't cite the particular authors in question without bothering to check, perhaps because he assumes (incorrectly) that Wolfram never gives credit to others at all.

Maybe assuming you can extrapolate a common criticism of a person in any way that occurs to you, and then presenting the extrapolations as fact isn't "lying," but whatever it is, it shouldn't have a very nice name.

Assume good faith.

Mistakes happen.

Not really clear why we should be incentivizing mistakes. "Just say whatever," you might say, "If someone really cared; they'll do the research for you."

Who said anything about incentivizing?

Corrections and even downvotes are fine. Accusing someone of acting in bad faith is completely different.

It's the same principle behind Cunningham's law.

In this discussion, the mistake was corrected in about an hour and included citations.

You can argue the morality of it, but it gets results.

Well, that's a bit silly. I could just apply that same motto to my comment! and then lambast the people accusing me of being errantly hateful.

I do apply the same motto to your comment. People shouldn't lambaste you over it either.

I believe (hope?) none of my comments in this thread could be regarded has hateful (errantly or otherwise).

> Also interesting, Wolfram mentions none of their work in his book, "A New Kind of Science".

There's one of the most blatant and ridiculous lies I've seen today, with such an obvious agenda. It's disgusting.

Turing and biological pigmentation patterns: https://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-1003g-text

Detailed summary of von Neumann's work in self-replication: https://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-876b-text

An index entry on Zuse and modelling the Universe as a cellular automaton, although the text itself is not freely available: https://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/index/z.html?Search...

Please don't use bald-faced lies to propagate hatred of anyone.

I stand corrected, I recall searching the index for Zuse, but did not review it for the others. I apologize.

You haven't yet deleted the false statements. Please do so, to avoid misleading readers.

Normally an edit would be good, if the post can't be edited any more, deleting it would just remove context from the concise rebuttal.

His wasn't an informed comment but it's best responded to with just the links you posted.

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).

It's sad that the Shalizi review is the first thing people refer to (it's sort of the Huffington Post of reviews).

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.

I meant to refer to that particular review, not his reviews in general. It's been a long time since I've poked through those, and they seem reasonable, which makes the review of Wolfram's work that much stranger.

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.

Sorry to go meta, but is there a review of that review which lays out some or most of the things you object to in it?

Here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972635#up_3974503

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?

I was eagerly anticipating A New Kind of Science and bought it when it was first available. But it was a tremendously aggravating read. It was repetitive, inconclusive, and far longer than the material merited. I came away thinking Wolfram must have set some kind of record for use of the personal pronoun "I" in a book, including autobiographies. The egotism shines through that much. Perhaps this accounts for the perception that nobody else gets credit in Wolfram's book.

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.

That's a strangely hostile response. I went through all of marktangotango's previous comments and didn't see one mention of Wolfram. Am I missing something?

The last sentence of his original comment.

No, (unless there was some edit that has been very cleverly camouflaged) -- an erroneous comment was taken as some kind of attack on Wolfram. I can't see any reasonable reading of that comment as "hate", though.

I'm unable to imagine an interpretation of that comment that isn't an attack on Wolfram.

Von Nueman? Is he related to von Neumann? ;)

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