Remember "Conway's Life"? - I have friends who would spend hours playing with "Life" - the cellular automata game. I played with it quite a bit myself. Now, a fellow named Stephen Wolfram is publishing a book that claims to launch a new kind of science based on the complexity which can be generated by the interactions of such cellular automata. The NYT website reports about it in: A Man Who Would Shake Up Science. This is the second article I've seen about this guy, and now my interest is piqued. The articles don't talk enough about how his ideas really work, but it sounds like the idea is to model complex systems with simple rules.