The Kindle preview of " A New Kind of Science " is very generous - over 100 pages. Definitely enough to give an overall flavor of the book. The hard copy of the book is virtually unreadable due to tiny text fonts. The Kindle version is very affordable compared to the $40 cost (down from $70) of the phone-book sized original. I would normally not review a book I have not read from cover to cover, but a good friend presented this book to me as one of the most interesting in his collection. For the sake of discussion, I felt the need to dive in. I didn't find the first 100 pages to be particularly difficult to understand, but there wasn't much that I found interesting or original. My impression was that the next 700 pages would milk the basic cellular automaton idea (not original with Wolfram) to construct "original" ways of looking at virtually everything, allowing Wolfram to insert himself as offering the key insight - the turning point - in virtually...