TITLE: Is "A New Kind of Science" a new kind of science?
QUESTION [61 upvotes]: A couple of years ago I was reading "New Kind of Science" (NKS) by S. Wolfram, and it presented lot of interesting ideas for a young Physics undergraduate. Now that I am studying Mathematics however, I realise that many ideas of NKS seem to be not so novel afterall, and contained in the Maths literature already, yet with different names.
Is NKS actually presenting novel material?
If yes, what in particular?
If not, what authors have already done this kind of work? Is NKS a "repackaging" of ideas?

REPLY [5 votes]: The problem is that asking if something is novel in science is actually very tricky because almost every scientific idea is based on previous work. Therefore, I don't think it is very valuable to question whether something is novel or not because it most certainly is not. However, you can ask if a particular work offers something interesting or particularly noteworthy. I will enumerate a few prominent ideas explained in NKS, including previous work (which is more or less what you asked):

A proposed method to analyse complex systems is to explore the computational universe to see what simple programs are able to do and document their behavior using experimental or analytic methods. Previous work: Edward Fredkin and Konrad Zuse proposed the idea that the universe might be a cellular automaton. In 1997, Schmidhuber described a Turing machine capable of computing all possible histories for the universe based on physical laws.  
Principle of computational irreducibility. Systems that display complex behavior can not be reduced and we need to run the experiment to see the outcome.
Principle of computational equivalence. Most sufficiently complex systems are computationally equivalent.
Turing completeness of Rule 110. Wolfram conjectured this in 1985. Matthew Cook (who worked as a research assistant to Wolfram) published a proof in 2000 and a legal battle ensued due to a violation of an NDA. Previous work: Conway's Game of Life, Von Neumann's idea of self-replicating machines.
Conjecture that the 2-state 3-symbol Turing machine is universal. Alex Smith proved this conjecture in 2007. 

There are other interesting ideas but most of them are extremely speculative and unlikely to be confirmed or falsified by evidence any time soon.