Cellular Phones and Cellular Automata

A colleague recently sent me a pointer to WolframTones, a clever site developed by Wolfram Research that uses cellular automata concepts to generate musical compositions that can be used as cellphone ringtones as a new kind of music. We have followed Wolfram's work for some time. Most notable is his book A New Kind of Science, which seeks to replace standard science with lots of cellular automata. Cellular automata are totally unrelated to cellular phones. The invention of CA's are often attributed to Manhattan Project physicist Stanislaw Ulam. In the 80s they were reapplied by Los Alamos Labs scientist Christopher Langton, to create a discipline called artificial life. We met Langton in the 90s as he pushed the modeling capability of AL, which then morphed into the modeling called Agent-Based Modeling, or ABM. That technology is being used to build corporate simulation models. The kind of models that Wolfram is proposing to replace conventional science are very different from those used for ABMs, but the general concept is the same: individual agents interacting in relatively simple ways generate complex behavior. Amazing that Ulam's phsyics would end up in cell phone tones and corporate models.