gmosx

8 Comments

by adamo, at 01 May 2010
Indeed he is a man with a mission. But his mission is described in 1000+ pages in NKS. This makes his mission obscure. For those who want to catch a glimpse of it and then decide whether to invest time in reading NKS, I suggest Chaitin's Meta-Math! (also available on arXiv).
by George Moschovitis, at 01 May 2010
George, thanks for the suggestion, even though the amazon reviews seem mostly negative...
by adamo, at 02 May 2010
There are many reasons why the reviews on Meta-Math! are negative: It is mostly an "ego" book (ie. What I've done for sciense and why it is more important than you think). This is understandable if one thinks that Chaitin has independently founded Algorithmic Information Theory and his work is compared to that of Kolmogorov's on Complexity. Given that Kolmogorov is a giant, the book has a "Hey! I am a giant too!". And yes he tries to establish a generalization on Goedel's theorem and on Turing's work and on Leibnitz's. But if you get past that (and you can) you will see true value on the book and it will help you decide on whether to invest time on NKS (he favors it a lot by the way).
by George Moschovitis, at 02 May 2010
You wet my appetite, I will read through the Kindle sample.
by adamo, at 03 May 2010
Available in PDF here: Meta Math! The Quest for Omega http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0404335
by adamo, at 10 May 2010
It seems that NKS is available online! http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html