Review: Adventures of a Computational Explorer by Stephen Wolfram

Rating: 2/5
Source: eARC from Netgalley for review
Genre: Essays
Pages: 421
Publication Date: October 15 2019


Blurb: A pretty random assortment of essays, speeches and blog posts by Stephen Wolfram, the inventor of Mathematica and things like Wolfram Alpha and voice recognition used in Siri.

Overall impression: I'm not a fan of all the arrogance, but even beyond that it's not great. Some interesting ideas.

The Good

There was an interesting chapter doing data science on Facebook data, looking at the clusters of people's friend networks and at lots of different parameters like the amount of people saying they were single, in a relationship, engaged, married, separated and widowed by age. His chapter looking at the personal analytics of his life over decades was also quite interesting, though I thought it must be an intense security risk having all his keystrokes logged and sending stats about himself automatically to his email every day. Assuming he cares about people knowing, I suppose.

He had an interesting point about purpose and how to recognise man-made or alien-made objects, saying that the way we recognise things as purposeful depends on our particular societal history. He said there are some things that are computationally irreducible, where to figure out what happens you just have to follow it along every step, and that traditionally humans have only produced things where we understand the outcome, but that in future we can search the computational universe of possible solutions and select things that work even if we don't know how - like many biological features that we would never be able to invent from nothing but that nonetheless do work. I guess that's sort of a neural net approach.


The Bad

The cockiness is insufferable. Yes, it seems like he is in fact very smart with his PhD at 20 and Eton-Oxford-Caltech and all that, but did we really need to go through him finding the exact day he got his PhD to see that he is still the record-holder for youngest Physics PhD? I feel like as you get older you're supposed to stop making things about you and start making them about the ideas. He sounds iike he might be a proper nerd and not just an asshole but man, how do you come across so arrogant in your own book? He also keeps promoting Mathematica/Wolfram Alpha/Wolfram Language etc, and while it was interesting to learn about abilities they have that I didn't know about, it was a bit much.

Some of the chapters I really just had to wonder why on earth they were included. In particular:

• an entire long chapter about the many options they considered for naming their programming language - ending in just naming it after himself!
• a chapter or two about naming functions for Mathematica and how it's like poetry
• a whole chapter about his personal file system, complete with a picture of the icons currently on his taskbar and of his primary-school Geography homework. I just didn't need to know the details of his folders, I really didn't.
• The details of his personal productivity infrastructure, like how he sets up his laptop with an iPad for presentations and how he runs work calls. 

There was just so much stuff that it seemed utterly egomaniacal to include and think the general public would be interested in. 

Some other chapters I didn't like were probably more just not my thing, like the chapter digging into polyhedra.

It's also largely stuff he's already published elsewhere, so I'm not sure why you'd buy it. Perhaps if you were a Wolfram fan already? That's something that bewilders me about why this was put on Netgalley for review: if your goal is to get good reviews and you already have so many fans who love your work, why not just send ARCs to them? Especially since it seems to be published by his own company.

This is especially the case because a lot of this doesn't seem intended for a general audience. He keeps referencing physics problems I don't know and never explaining them, and I am doing a science degree so I know more about it than the general public. Some of the ideas sounded interesting, like the Principle of Computational Equivalence (seems to be about how simple patterns can end up constructing extremely complex or computationally irreducible things so sophisticated results don't imply complex patterns, which apparently means that beyond a low threshold all intelligence is as good computationally and we can't use complex patterns to infer inteligence), but he didn't explain them properly so it was a waste. I think it's set out in a 1300-page book he spent a decade writing, A New Kind of Science, but if you're going to keep referencing something I don't think it makes sense to expect people to have read a different 1300-page book. You should at least call it a sequel.

He also had a weird bit implying Africans and 'Amerindians' didn't historically use fabric...?

Finally, many of the pictures were impossible to make out on my iPad.

In summary: This was a book by someone who seems to think everything he thinks and does is fascinating, and not the book about the ways we can think about things computationally I thought it was.