And you're in a good company. Feynman for example found it fascinating too, that's why he worked at Thinking Machines and made first cellular automata based QCD simulations.
Outcome of this popular fascination is now known as AI-winter.
That surprises me. My impression was that AI from the AI-winter era has quite the opposite paradigm from NKS (or evolutionary methods or whatever). I thought it was more logic based.
To me it is letting complex things emerge from simple rules (like ant paths emerging from simple behaviors of ants).
The classical AI approach was more about modeling, knowledge representation, inference rules, decision trees and so on. The only thing related to NKS the classics dabbled with were neural networks. Most of them were also very restricted, though - in order to have a shot at analyzing them, the common neural networks have relatively simple structures.
The idea of cellular automata is of course not from Wolfram, but he studied them to an impressive extent. To me they are just one variant of the theme, though. For me NKS is not the invention of evolutionary computation. But it portrays one part of it very well. And he argues that many things could be handled in that way, which was not obvious (I remember how he could imagine the real world to work like an cellular automaton, and still agree with quantum mechanics).
We started from me claimimg that the subject is not fascinating, by which I understood "interesting scientifically" and not aesthetically or philosophically pleasant. This is a point independent from gauging NKS content itself.
You still haven't said what is the scientifical idea.
Because I for one don't know. John McCarthy doesn't too, he once hoped to gain such knowledge by careful study, and later remarked regarding Wolfram "In the 1950s I thought that the smallest possible (symbol-state product) universal Turing machine would tell something about the nature of computation. Unfortunately, it didn’t. Instead as simpler universal machines were discovered, the proofs that they were universal became more elaborate, and [so] did the encodings of information."
how he could imagine the real world to work like an cellular automaton, and still agree with quantum mechanics
Oh, and he got that wrong too... (by the so called No Hidden Variables theorem).
OK, let's forget about NKS, I just thought that is what you have your grudge about. I am not very concerned about NKS specifically).
But I am also not sure exactly what you want. For example, would it be strange to you if I found ants fascinating? Even though there is no scientific idea at first. Maybe if you look at ants for a while, you'll generate all sorts of ideas (and even in Goedel-Escher-Bach, which I guess is very classic AI, they make an appearance).
So I am not sure that I accept your complaint that you can see no scientifical idea. Actually I am not sure, what is a "scientifical idea"? (Honest question)
Looking at cellular automata I get all sorts of ideas. So I find them fascinating. And why is it not a "scientifical idea" for you to build complex things from simple rules? I don't think it is such an obvious idea.
I am willing to try to answer your question, but first please explain to me what aspect exactly you want to hear about ("scientifical idea").
As for McCarthy, I don't really worry much about what he thinks, especially since LISP is actually from the "classic AI" side of things (I don't mean that as disrespectful - but he is a specialist for LISP and computation, not for complex systems). I think finding the smallest Turing machine was just something to be done for fun - I don't think Wolfram thought much more about it either. So that finding it did not blow McCarthy's mind hardly disqualifies the whole subject in my opinion.
Also, could you link to the No Hidden Variables vs Wolframs suggestion please? It was only a wildly speculative thing, even in NKS, though - not the cornerstone of his world view.
1/ Aristotle's classification of forces and the idea of quintessence;
2/ Plato's idea that planets move necessarily in circles, because it's the most beautiful and simplest shape. That one witheld progress in astronomy for 2000 years;
3/ Beautiful idea that the market is a statistical system, and thus can be modeled by tools of mathematical physics. That the assumptions of these models are not met in economy, no one bothered much till just recently.
So you take some guiding rule first, and then force world around to accept it.
Um, cellular automata can by definition not be wrong, because they are only what you define them to be. So your assumptions about them can not be wrong.
I think I get an idea where you are coming from, though, and I lost all interest in discussing with you.
[I know who you are] and I lost all interest in discussing with you
Oh, so sorry.
PS. I got that as consciously and purposely insulting.
What I wanted to say, and probably failed, is that beautiful patterns do not form any interesting science, that is they lead to no knowledge. This is a classical dichotomy between intuitionist/inductive and deductive philosophies of science.
I did not say "I know who you are" - I just got the impression that you are not really interested in the discussion, as you started with strawman argumentation ("Plato held back astronomy for 2000 years").
I think cellular automata provide at least one way to study complex systems, which is a relevant field of study.
