What criticisms have people made of NKS?
Various reviewers thought the NKS book failed to do justice to their own specialties or oversimplified them, e.g. some chaos theorists who think the randomness seen in chaos does not arise essentially from randomness in initial conditions, and some biologists who think biological machinery is more complicated than the simple programs NKS posits as producing various living structures. Some involved with quantum computing are convinced continuous infinities are not idealizations but are real, and allow essentially greater computational sophistication than the discrete systems NKS considers. Some reviewers react with incredulity to the idea that all sorts of systems could be based on programs rather than equations, or that everything could be a computation, sometimes confusing either with a claim that everything is a cellular automaton. Others claim one or another idea found in the NKS book is older and originated elsewhere. Some reviewers are anxious to hear falsifiable predictions, othe
