This also happens to be untrue, to put it generously.
As far as I understand the story, Stephen told Matthew: here, this CA seems rich enough for universality, can you prove this for the book? Matthew duly proved it -- a tour-de-force proof, to be sure. Then Matthew broke his NDA by publishing the result early. Stephen litigated to avoid it becoming public prematurely (it was, as you say, the center-piece of the book).
I'm not privy to all the ins and outs and what-have-yous, but that seems fair. If you tried to publish something behind your advisor's back in an academic setting, you'd have a lot to answer for.
Matthew eventually did publish the Rule 110 proof under his own name in Wolfram's own journal.
If you tried to publish something behind your advisor's
back in an academic setting, you'd have a lot to answer for.
Hmm, but similarly if I made a contribution to a breakthrough, and my adviser was going to publish it without my name being associated with it at all, I would feel cheated. I think that's probably a better analogy.
It is a very strange setup where Stephen is claiming he created the work done by others. Legal, certainly, but not very nice. I guess I wouldn't care to work for one of the most egotistical people on earth, however smart he is.
Do you have any evidence that Stephen planned to avoid crediting Cook? I've never heard, seen, or read Stephen claiming the proof as his own. In fact, Stephen tells quite a detailed history of the proof in the notes to NKS, which you can read here http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-1115c-text. A short excerpt:
"His initial results were encouraging, but after a few months he became increasingly convinced that rule 110 would never in fact be proved universal. I insisted, however, that he keep on trying, and over the next several years he developed a systematic computer-aided design system for working with structures in rule 110. Using this he was then in 1994 successfully able to find the main elements of the proof. Many details were filled in over the next year, some mistakes were corrected in 1998, and the specific version in the note below was constructed in 2001."
I certainly don't know anything about this from firsthand knowledge. The credit you cite in ANKOS happened long after their lawsuits and falling out, so there's no way of knowing how things would have transpired if Cook just went along with things.
"The real problem with this result, however, is that it is not Wolfram's. He didn't invent cyclic tag systems, and he didn't come up with the incredibly intricate construction needed to implement them in Rule 110. This was done rather by one Matthew Cook, while working in Wolfram's employ under a contract with some truly remarkable provisions about intellectual property. In short, Wolfram got to control not only when and how the result was made public, but to claim it for himself. In fact, his position was that the existence of the result was a trade secret. Cook, after a messy falling-out with Wolfram, made the result, and the proof, public at a 1998 conference on CAs. (I attended, and was lucky enough to read the paper where Cook goes through the construction, supplying the details missing from A New Kind of Science.) Wolfram, for his part, responded by suing or threatening to sue Cook (now a penniless graduate student in neuroscience), the conference organizers, the publishers of the proceedings, etc. (The threat of legal action from Wolfram that I mentioned at the beginning of this review arose because we cited Cook as the person responsible for this result.)"
That doesn't put things in a very good light. I have no idea if it is accurate or not. I just found your initial attempt to paint Cook as the bad guy unfortunate. Why would Cook have tried to publish on his own? That would be very unusual, and the simplest explanation is that it must have been some sort of disagreement over academic credit. Why else would he do that?
I'm not saying Cook was a bad guy. I don't think it is necessary for there to be a bad guy, despite Cosma's rather bilious essay. Would Wolfram have tried to claim the result as his own? Maybe, maybe not, I don't know, but it doesn't seem consistent with what I do know about him. I'll ask Stephen the next time I talk to him.
As far as I understand the story, Stephen told Matthew: here, this CA seems rich enough for universality, can you prove this for the book? Matthew duly proved it -- a tour-de-force proof, to be sure. Then Matthew broke his NDA by publishing the result early. Stephen litigated to avoid it becoming public prematurely (it was, as you say, the center-piece of the book).
I'm not privy to all the ins and outs and what-have-yous, but that seems fair. If you tried to publish something behind your advisor's back in an academic setting, you'd have a lot to answer for.
Matthew eventually did publish the Rule 110 proof under his own name in Wolfram's own journal.
I speak for myself, not WRI, here.