Editing A New Kind of Science (section)

===Mapping and mining the computational universe===
In order to study simple rules and their often-complex behavior, Wolfram argues that it is necessary to systematically explore all these computational systems and document what they do. He further argues that this study should become a new branch of science, like [[physics]] or [[chemistry]]. The basic goal of this field is to understand and characterize the computational universe using experimental methods.

The proposed new branch of scientific exploration admits many different forms of scientific production. For instance, qualitative classifications are often the results of initial forays into the computational jungle. On the other hand, explicit proofs that certain systems compute this or that function are also admissible. Some forms of production are also in some ways unique to this field of study—for example, the discovery of computational mechanisms that emerge in different systems but in bizarrely different forms.

Another type of production involves the creation of programs for the analysis of computational systems. In the ''NKS'' framework, these themselves should be simple programs, and subject to the same goals and methodology. An extension of this idea is that the human mind is itself a computational system, and hence providing it with raw data in as effective a way as possible is crucial to research. Wolfram believes that programs and their analysis should be visualized as directly as possible, and exhaustively examined by the thousands or more. Since this new field concerns abstract rules, it can in principle address issues relevant to other fields of science. But in general, Wolfram's idea is that novel ideas and mechanisms can be discovered in the computational universe, where they can be represented in their simplest forms, and then other fields can choose among these discoveries for those they find relevant.