Registered: Nov 2004
Posts: 36

This paper, which I found on the arXiv.org, talks about coarse graining of cellular automata.

http://arxiv.org/abs/nlin.CG/0508033

It looks to me like this kind of work would be very important for being able to make predictions about universal cellular automata. Does anyone have any comments about this paper?

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Craig

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Registered: Feb 2004
Posts: 35

The work of Goldenfeld appeared in a New Scientist article back in February. There's some more details in this post.

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Registered: Jul 2004
Posts: 35

this article is old news by now. in addition to ppearing in phys rev letters, it got a lot of press in pop science magazines and the physics community loved it, most likely because it was 'anti-wolfram'.

but bottom line is that it is totally irrelevant to NKS. nigel is basically saying that if you're satisfied with approximate predictive ability or understanding than physics as it's done today is good enough to accomplish that. it does NOT address computational irreducibility.

i guues one could say it describes physics as it is done in the old joke where someone asks a physicist how much milk a cow produces in a day who replie, 'we can calculate that easily enough - fist we assume the cow is spherical.

if that level of knowledge is satisfctory to you, then here are adequate directions to get to the mathematica developer's conference "go to the state of Illinois"

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"I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.". - H.D. Thoreau

"Correlation is not Causation and Big Data is not Science" - R.J. Gaylord

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