What is the relationship between NKS and previous approaches?
Wolfram writes in chapter 1 of the book “My goals in this book are sufficiently broad and fundamental that there have inevitably been previous attempts to achieve at least some of them. But without the ideas and methods of this book there have been basic issues that have eventually ended up presenting almost insuperable barriers to every major approach that has been tried.” The NKS book, p. 12. Wolfram discusses numerous approaches there – artificial intelligence, artificial life, catastrophe theory, chaos, complexity theory, computational complexity, cybernetics, dynamical systems, evolution, experimental mathematics, fractals, general systems theory, nanotechnology, nonlinear dynamics, scientific computing, self-organization, and statistical mechanics. Ibid, pp. 12-16. Many precursors had a piece of this or that idea that informed the development of NKS. The acknowledgements section on pages xii through xiv of the NKS book mentions several hundred people Wolfram worked with or spoke
