Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" is a 1,280p opus on physics, math, human behavior, and most of all, cellular automata. We live in an age where nobody reads books that long anymore, so here is Lawrence Gray's 2003 gem of a book review: http://www.ams.org/notices/200302/fea-gray.pdf

I have tremendous respect for what Wolfram has accomplished in his career. It is no easy feat to write 1,280 page manifesto on physics, consciousness, and reality itself, and I hope to write a short treatise of my own someday in the same spirit (probably not on cellular automata)

It is no easy feat to bootstrap a $3B remote company that builds a *developer tool* and control the vast majority of its shares, all while still spending half the time coding and doing research in notebooks. Pretty much my dream career

From what I can glean from reviews, ANKS is not rigorous to merit mathematical originality and makes many unsupported assertions. But time may vindicate the importance of discrete dynamical systems in building computational models of physics that are too big to fit in our heads.

Keep these reviews in mind as you work on your manfiesto! https://slate.com/human-interest/2002/07/stephen-wolfram-s-science-fiction.html

Is the Universe a Universal Computer? by Melanie Mitchell
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.972.3385&rep=rep1&type=pdf

The World According to Wolfram - Brian Hayes
http://bit-player.org/wp-content/extras/bph-publications/AmSci-2002-07-Hayes-Wolfram.pdf

Tip for ML researchers: if you want your name pronounced by researchers for decades to come, stop naming your ML algorithms after sesame street and puns!

Wolfram uses this to great effect with his blog post on why they ended up calling it "Wolfram language"

Scott Aaronson's review https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0206089.pdf - notably proving some incompatibilities with Wolfram's deterministic model of QM with special relativity and Bell inequalities.

Aaronson on the importance of a modest writing voice to avoid those hyper-critical Reviewer 2 comments

Ray Kurzweil's review, in which I learn that Kurzweil has an excellent sense of humor. Love the Guru Desai reference! https://www.kurzweilai.net/reflections-on-stephen-wolfram-s-a-new-kind-of-science

Leo P. Kadanoff's review https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.1506752. .

Henry Cohn's review https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews/a-new-kind-of-science