In all fairness, there is some terrific work being done in academia. World changing work - but this work is obscured by the mass of illegitimate ramblings of the game players.
What is science?? I was taught that science is posing a question, and then systematically defining an experiment to answer the hypothesis. Has it changed so much? Few care whether their methods are truly scientific so long as their "results" are "publishable".
Yesterday, I had some mental progress (indeed this is what I will call all of my ideas from now on - until I implement them) on the Newell machine. It came difficultly. I had some vague idea, some visualization of the workings of the machine, but no idea what I was trying to express, until now, now I have an inkling. I wanted Cellular Automata to be able to compress files, to generate transformations, recognize patterns, multiply matrices, to be a black-box calculating machine grinding through millions of calculations with the ease of 4 or 5 simple rules. I am picturing the wedding of Cellular Automata with Genetic Algorithms. I am picturing a parallel system. I am picturing emergent behavior. I am picturing discovery - simply discovery.
