Wolfram | Alpha: Prequel

A New Kind of Science (NKS)

An hour and a half with Stephen. Wolfram, that is, not Downes. SD’s Web site is down as I write and has been for a couple of days. Ouch! Maybe tomorrow.

I thought this video would be a great segue into Connectivism and Connective Knowledge and also, Swarm Intelligence, which I am reading about when time permits. I think there are similarities between the behaviour and activities of CCK09 agents and that of ants. Hyperlinks. Scent trails. Emergent phenomena. Systems of interacting agents. Self-organization. Hmmm…

Wolfram’s presentation from April, 2003, highlights the stuff in his book, A New Kind of Science. He uses Cellular Automata to model many types of complex dynamic systems. The book (or tome, rather) took ten years to write. He retreated from the world again, to create Wolfram | Alpha, so this may have been one of his last speaking engagements before entering the cloister of chaos for another five years.

Well worth the hour and a half. Cheers!

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