Unfortunately the documenting of my response has stalled these past few weeks, in part because I need to allocate quality time to his copious notes on his two concluding chapters which may well provide more substantiation of, or at least more clues to the thinking behind, the one claim with which I cannot shake a feeling of substantial disagreement.

Documentation of my response and plans for an experiment which might test that area of disagreement has also become stalled due to other commitments at around 4500 words, three graphics, some working prototype code and some pseudocode, and I really had intended to leave the parts stalled until the whole (and the reading) was complete.

However the question is too important, so during the hiatus I have dribbled fractured and tired time at an almost do it all myself scale mini Conway Life experiment, the opportunity for which was pointed to in my recent post here Empowering Smart Mobs.

Having himself defined the notion of Class 4 cellular automata, Wolfram may have joined the retreat from the once perceived importance of the edge of chaos-border of order. While I am well aware that others on the track of this oft elusive boundary region have also become frustrated, at the level I work I only see more and more evidence building up that it offers a real key to understanding the world we find ourselves in, at all levels.

My current reading of NKS is that it shows Wolfram softening on Class 4 and eventually almost smudging it out with his Principle of Computational Equivalence. To me that flies in the face of the fundamentals of adaptive systems as exemplified by the deep significance of symbiosis demonstrated bby Lynn Margulis in Microcosmos.

I really don't want to go deeper into this issue now, nor into the many many areas of strong agreement I have with NKS. While we are both part of an emerging concensus that space time energy matter is most likely the product of a simple network at the Planck scale, the important point to remember is that cellular automata provide a much more accessible environment for experimenting with simple systems.

The real point is to look a bit smarter for interesting results at the border of order-edge of chaos. Though it is nowhere near that edge, my earlier work extending Fredkin's simple cellular automata as Pattern Breeder may also be gaining some previously unsuspected relevance. Gaps can grow faster than c.