Paul's Comments

There is a $25,000 challenge for solving a problem located at Wolfram Science, in which, given a two-state machine with three colors, prove that it is universal.

And at this point I don't get it. There are three possible reasons (that I can think of) as to why I don't get it. I'm not sure if either (1) I don't have the background to understand the problem that he (Stephen Wolfram) is trying to solve; (2) he's not explaining it correctly because he's unable or unwilling to do so; (3) he is intentionally being obtuse because the reason isn't really to offer a problem to solve, but because he has some ulterior motive such as to sell more copies of his book or for some other reason having ulterior or less than savory motives.

Here are the comments (with additional amplification) that I posted on slashdot related to an article about it.

I have read the points Wolfram is making, and the example given that he wants some proof related to the issue of Universality, as well as the cell site given. And while I do think I do have quite a bit of intelligence, I do not understand any of this. I don't get what the change states are, and I don't understand what he is trying to solve. I believe there is an old rule - never ascribe to malice what can equally be explained by stupidity - which would apply here.

Maybe I've been spoiled by the (simplicity of the) cellular automata rules in the (Martin Conway) game of Life, and maybe because of that I don't get this. At least, that's what I am trying to understand, is he saying that eventually the set of rules for these two states have a particular sequence that repeats (e.g. he wants to discover if there is a point of convergence), so that no matter what state it is in, eventually it will cycle to that state again, or what?

I think it was the late Kurt Vonnegut (although it may be someone else) who stated that anyone who can't explain what they are doing to a six-year-old is a fraud. For example: what does a computer programmer do? He teaches computers. What am I doing here writing this blog that probably less than a dozen people read? Wasting my time. :)

Why target a six-year-old as the default audience for a description of anyone's activity? Probably because the average six-year-old is brighter than most adults. (If you doubt this, consider that at six it's possible to learn multiple spoken languages and many other things; the average adult has trouble communicating in their own language, let alone in more than one.)

So there is the possibility the whole thing is a scam, but if so, he's far too much of a cheapskate to be running it, since most really good scams depend on the greed of the mark, and you usually have to offer a bit to get people interested; witness all the overpriced oil contract and deposed dictator scams that are sent around by e-mail, talk about how they have several million dollars trapped in some bank or security office and offer you, the mark, 20% or so to help them scam someone else. You're not going to get people interested much, in say, 20% of a $500,000 scam but you can seriously raise the greed of people who aren't thinking when you're talking about 20% of ten million.

But I'm willing to give Wolfram the benefit of the doubt and say that his real problem is that while the subject is extremely esoteric, he has failed to make the issue understandable by the people who would be expected to solve it. Programmers - like myself - are exceptionally good at puzzles, and some - again, like myself (no false modesty here) - are fairly bright and are willing to take on a challenge, the problem is that we as problem solvers have to be able to understand the problem in order to solve it.

I think either he needs to explain what he wants to solve better, or he needs to hire someone bright who can translate the explanation of what he is trying to determine to others so they can understand it. I think, were he to provide a better explanation of what he is interested in discovering, he'd have a better chance of getting people to try and solve it. This presumes he actually wants a solution and that this is not some advertising scheme to sell more of his books. (If that were the case, he'd really need to throw more money at it. He could always rig the rules such that you can't really win.) But since you could read them on-line I don't see where that's all that much of an issue.

So I'll grant the premise that he is seriously looking for a solution to a legitimate problem. (A "legitimate problem" is one where the person wants a solution, e.g. when I lose my car keys before I'm going to go somewhere I have a legitimate problem.) But he definitely needs to find a way to explain it better if he actually wants it solved, or throw more money at it in order to make people smell blood.