How do simple programs behave

Whereas once the world view of the ancient world was shifted by Pythagorean mathematics, scientific knowledge and human perception has been contested in the 21st century by developments in computation. In his ground-breaking book Stephen Wolfram, the British physicist and creator of the Mathematica program, asserted that the complexity of the universe could be clearly understood in terms of simple programs. Here in an exclusive extract, Wolfram describes how one of the most straightforward programs, cellular automata, despite adhering to simple rules, yields some surprisingly complex results. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.