Wolfram's talent for self-promotion has been nicely demonstrated by the publicity campaign ahead of his WolframAlpha launch. Multiple pre-announcements, screenshots, peek-reviews, demos have been appearing on NH for weeks already.
Which may not be a bad thing, except it all comes at a price of credibility. Why does one need to create all that fuzz? Isn't it because the revolutionary product/idea cannot win followers and reputation solely on its merits?
Same applies to his book. With a bit of modesty its impact could have been so much greater. Especially since its subject is indeed fascinating.
Wolfram is remarkably short-sighted. You'd think that such a smart guy would have realized that spending 1100+ pages blowing is own horn would tend to turn off the very people he hoped to convince.
They say that love is blind, ego must just be plain blinding.
Kurzweil's write-up on it is also good:
I prefer this review:
Wolfram is a brilliant, egotistical, narcissistic credit hog. The history of science is littered with them. Some of the greatest discoveries of mankind are credited to the wrong people.
Until I read the PDF, I assumed this would be about Nobody Knows Shoes. It's better to abbreviate A New Kind of Science as ANKOS to avoid confusion.
Thanks for the alley-oop? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=612002
I'm more impressed with the book than the review.
It's a good review, no doubt, but I think Aaronson, while catching Wolfram using a bit of hyperbole on occasions, misses the essence of what NKS is.
It's not simply a review of existing CS theory.
The Feynman quote was quite illuminating. Wolfram does take the discrete conversation to the next step. He doesn't answer the questions, mainly because what he is proposing is, well, a New Kind of Science. Which means that there are going to be hundreds or thousands of questions.
What might be missing the most is a methodology for exploration. But I think overall Wolfram is just a bit ahead of his time. Those things will be worked out.