Mensaje citado por: Richard Schroeppel <rcs@CS.Arizona.EDU>:

[Thanks to Paul Chapman on the Life list for pointing this out.]

Larry Gray's review of Wolfram's ANKoS is available online at

http://www.ams.org/notices/200302/fea-gray.pdf

This is a much more useful review than the previous AMS screed. It points to some of the useful ideas in the book, and doesn't get carried away with criticism of Wolfram. It also mentions a half dozen other reviews, with one sentence summaries.

Rich rcs@cs.arizona.edu

It is amazing how the same mathematical society could publish two such divergent reviews, the first of which would have been more suitable for Mad Magazine (if it still exists). Unfortunately, Gray conjectures that with the publication of ANKOS, it may be that Matthew Cook could finally publish his proof, and one might even hope that it could appear in the acta of the 1998 Santa Fe conference; but that may not happen. Well, the Acta has been postponed until April, 2003 (checking into Barnes and Noble last night) and Cook's web page at CalTech has been "disappeared" (replaced by a "FORBIDDEN" notice, that is). But the pages of other graduate students in Erik Winfree's group, those which have put up pages, are still accessible. One might conjecture that something is going on. That universality proof still hangs in limbo. Of the three parts, the glider collisions check out, the global synchronization seems plausible although the description laid out in ANKOS does not match the text, and the lack of references to the cyclic tag system creates the suspicion that this must be as much original work on the part of Cook as the discovery of the leapfrog and the predicate. Indeed, until Wolfram fills in the details of the work presented in ANKOS or permits someone else to publish them, the book has to be regarded as a travesty. In that direction, although Freeman Dyson or Steve Weinberg are certainly well qualified to comment on ANKOS's field theory, it seems that neither of them has delved deeply enough into the details (or been motivated to comment in writing} on its relevance to string theory or quantum cohomology. Maybe Wolfram will get busy on that too! There's a lot of work ahead to fully validate ANMKOS. - hvm ------------------------------------------------- Obtén tu correo en www.correo.unam.mx UNAMonos Comunicándonos