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I am curious to hear what people thought about the diagrams in Wolfram's New Kind of Science, and was wondering whether anybody else felt like they had seen those patterns somewhere else. When I was reading the chapters, I couldn't help going back to the pictures because I knew that I had seen them before (which I guess isn't necessarily strange, since we have been talking about how similar patterns can exist in different systems, from the beginning of the first day of class), but couldn't figure out why. Just yesterday, I realized where I saw them. They actually look surprisingly similar to a picture on this book that I read some years ago. Unfortunately, so far I haven't been successful in figuring out what the book was called, but I think it was written by a professor at Amherst College. The picture was of a roof of a house, and it was drawn by her autistic daughter.  Like most autistic people, this girl could stay engrossed for hours in an activity that she found interesting, and exploring patterns was the activity that fascinated her. For this reason, she could spend hours on drawing out patterns like the bricks of a roof, and managed to produce the most amazing art work.

In addition to her talent in art, this girl managed to figure out amazingly high level patterns in math. I don't know if you woud call her a mathematician, becuase she never studied math or worked with equations, but she could just spend hours and hours writing out and thinking about the patterns, and as a result, she found out things that nobody had yet managed to found. As I remember it, some students at Amherst later worked with her and compiled her findings into theory. The reason why I started to think about the procedure that this girl and the Amherst students went through, is because to me, it seemed to resemble the way Wolfram ran the cellular automaton and used the patterns drawn out by the computer to come up with his discoveries.