new kind of science, for real

Great Microsoft Research report (from a workshop they held?): 2020 Science where they argue that computer science will become part and parcel of science in general. For example, computation theory will be important to understand biological organisms as information processing systems. This is basically a much better version of Wolfram’s New Kind of Science argument — I believe this one. The big shared insight is that computers aren’t just about data storage and number crunching. Wolfram and the some of the Santa Fe complex systems people are really in to simulations, which is fine. But there’s tremendous potential in computation theory — algorithms, formal representations, and more. Empirical scientists are going to have to learn this stuff!