I'm a big fan of Gerard t' Hooft's Cellular Automata Interpretation. Most of the things described by Wolfram were already there, in fact, I would argue that most of the things with strict connection to real physics were already described by Gerard t' Hooft in a similar manner (energy and momentum interpretations are very similar)
However, they are different in that Gerard t'Hooft has a single ontic state where Wolfram has branching from undeterministic applications of rules. I'm not sure how Wolfram can derive unitary evolution.
The graph rewriting is cool and novel. I do agree that cellular automata are somewhat limited. Their most obvious limitation is having Manhattan distance. 4 or 8 directions to move through in lower level is something that effects large scale. But most of the models wolfram proposes still produce some grid-like structure, and in some sense his visualization is misleading.
>where Wolfram has branching from undeterministic applications of rules. I'm not sure how Wolfram can derive unitary evolution.
I don't think it's right to call it nondeterministic: every possible sequence of rules happens, separately. It seems to lend itself easily to the Many-Worlds Interpretation of QM.
I don't know if that's true, because I think the idea of a rule having causal invariance is that the many paths converge anyway into causal sequences of events that always hold.
However, they are different in that Gerard t'Hooft has a single ontic state where Wolfram has branching from undeterministic applications of rules. I'm not sure how Wolfram can derive unitary evolution.
The graph rewriting is cool and novel. I do agree that cellular automata are somewhat limited. Their most obvious limitation is having Manhattan distance. 4 or 8 directions to move through in lower level is something that effects large scale. But most of the models wolfram proposes still produce some grid-like structure, and in some sense his visualization is misleading.