What Is Ruliology?
32 points - last Tuesday at 6:40 AM
SourcePaulRobinson
today at 9:07 AM
I actually think this is just computer science. Why? Because the first "computer scientist" - Alan Turing - was interested in this exact same set of ideas.
The first programs he wrote for the Atlas and the Mark II ("the Baby"), seem to have been focused on a theory he had around how animals got their markings.
They look a little to me (as a non-expert in these areas, and reading them in a museum over about 15 minutes, not doing a deep analysis), like a primitive form of cellular automata algorithm. From the scrawls on the print outs, it's possible that he was playing with the space of algorithms not just the algorithms themselves.
It might be worth going back and looking at that early work he did and seeing it through this lens.
Alan Turing is FAR from the first computer scientist, though, if we want to be pedantic
It's starting to sound an awful lot like a Ruligion.
mvr123456
today at 10:18 AM
Sure, it's typical Wolfram, inviting the typical criticism. If you can understand what he's talking about at all then you won't be very convinced it's new. If you can't understand what he's talking about, then you also won't be interested in the puffery and priority dispute.
The rest of his stuff tagged ruliology is more interesting though. Here's one connecting ML and cellular automata: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/08/whats-really-goi...
Ruliology provides a powerful descriptive framework - a taxonomy of computational behavior. However, it operates at the level of external dynamics without grounding in a primitive ontology. It tells us that rules behave, not why they exist or what they fundamentally are.
This makes ruliology an invaluable cartography of the computational landscape, but not a foundation. It maps the territory without explaining what the territory is made of.
throwaway132448
today at 9:21 AM
Surprised it’s not called Wolfrology. This man is ego personified - not reading.
ahartmetz
today at 9:46 AM
If you want other people to name something after you, you have to give it a name they have reason to replace.
Someone mentioned his apparently failed earlier work ANKOS. I had to look that up - it is 2002 book by Wolfram with seemingly similar ideas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science
But exactly what is the problem here? Other than perhaps a very mechanical view of the universe (which he shares with many other authors) where it is hard to explain things like consciousness and other complex behaviors.
With Wolfram it is usually the grandstanding and taking credit for other people's work. Inventing new words for old things is part and parcel of that. He has a lot in common with Schmidhuber, both are arguably very smart people but the fact that other people can be just as smart doesn't seem to fit their worldview.
gritspants
today at 9:36 AM
He may be smarter than I am, but I'm smart enough to tell that he's not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.
I am struggling to understand what is new here - other than the word ruliad - which to me seems to similar to what we have in theoretical computer science when we talk about languages, sentences, and grammars.
It's just Wolfram explaining how he likes stuying things that can be describe by simple rules and how complexity can emerge in spite of (or because of?) the seeming simplicity of those rules. He came up with a word for it, and while I think "ruliology" sounds a bit silly, it does say what's on the tin.
This looks very exciting but wolfram language being paywalled makes me super sad I can't play around with it
The Wolfram Engine (essentially the Wolfram Language interpreter/execution environment) is free: https://www.wolfram.com/engine/. You can download it and run Wolfram code.
Wolfram Mathematica (the Jupyter Notebook-like development environment) is paid, but there are free and open source alternatives like https://github.com/WLJSTeam/wolfram-js-frontend.
> WLJS Notebook ... [is] A lightweight, cross-platform alternative to Mathematica, built using open-source tools and the free Wolfram Engine.
KnuthIsGod
today at 8:28 AM
[flagged]
he invented the term and so pleased its blowing up.
Amount of "I" and "me" is astonishing.
Didn't find anything on falsifiable criteria -- any new theory should be able, at least in theory, to be tested for being not true.
Isn't this his personal blog? The domain name is "stephenwolfram.com", this is his personal website. Of course there will be "I"'s and "me"'s — this website is about him and what he does.
As for falsifiability:
> You have some particular kind of rule. And it looks as if it’s only going to behave in some particular way. But no, eventually you find a case where it does something completely different, and unexpected.
So I guess to falsify a theory about some rule you just have to run the rule long enough to see something the theory doesn't predict.
he be the trump of his new kinda science world.