Matthew Cook probably violated an NDA he signed with Wolfram Research

This is a follow-up to this comment on a previous post of mine about (Stephen) Wolfram.

The comment, by gwern:

Charitably, I think that makes his apparent 'arrogance' better understood as something like a 'literary convention', especially given the plausibility of him having 'independently re-discovered' some of the particular results he reports.

Is it customary to sue over literary conventions?

Gwern linked to the "History" section of the Wikipedia page about Rule 110:

In 2004, Matthew Cook published a proof that Rule 110 with a particular repeating background pattern is Turing complete, i.e., capable of universal computation, which Stephen Wolfram had conjectured in 1985.[1] Cook presented his proof at the Santa Fe Institute conference CA98 before publication of Wolfram's book A New Kind of Science. This resulted in a legal affair based on a non-disclosure agreement with Wolfram Research.[2] Wolfram Research blocked publication of Cook's proof for several years.[3]

I suspect that the account in the second comment below is the most plausible explanation of what resulted in this lawsuit; from a comment on Hacker News and two replies to it from NKS contains a mention of the proof that Rule 110 is Turing Complete. This is ge... | Hacker News [formatted]:

LowKarmaAccount on June 24, 2013 | parent | context | favorite | on: Celebrating Mathematica’s First Quarter Century

NKS contains a mention of the proof that Rule 110 is Turing Complete. This is genuinely interesting, but it doesn't change its field in a significant way. Of course, Wolfram didn't come up with the proof himself. That was done by Matthew Cook while he was working for Wolfram Research. Stephen Wolfram obtained a court order preventing Cook from presenting his result before NKS was published, because he claimed that publishing this result violated an NDA Cook signed.

taliesinb on June 24, 2013 | next [–]

According to Wolfram, Cook's job was to prove Rule 110 was universal. Cook didn't "discover" it as an independent action.

In a very direct sense, this was a software development task, where the program that was being written was precisely a universal program (through several layers of emulation, of course; rule 110 -> 'particle computer' -> cyclic tag system -> Turing machine). It's an impressive program, but also quite mechanical. More details: http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-681#previous

Here's the timeline as far as I've been able to determine, mostly from sources inside the company:

0. Wolfram tasked Cook with finding a proof that 110 was universal.
1. With encouragement and help, Cook finished the proof many years before the book was ready.
2. Cook tried to publish the program/proof at some complexity conference.
3. Wolfram asked him not to, because it was against the terms of his contract.
4. Cook agreed not to, but then did it anyway.
5. Wolfram threatened legal action to prevent the proof being published.

This kind of thing is clearly a breakdown of the relationship between Cook and Wolfram. Is there a good guy and a bad guy? Maybe, maybe not. But if we see this proof as a program, I'm sure many people would agree that publishing code one was paid to write, without permission, is kind of a no-no.

To my mind, this doesn't so much paint Wolfram as a lawsuit-happy egomaniac as it does expose some of the contradictions of a running a private company as a commercial venture and as a vehicle for one's own research.

edit: I work for Wolfram, as probably some HN users already know and as I mention elsewhere on this thread. But when I heard about the whole Cook thing a couple of years ago, I asked around about what happened to make sure I wasn't working for a company that was unethical. The above is what I was able to determine.

jpdoctor on June 24, 2013 | prev [–]

Stephen Wolfram obtained a court order preventing Cook from presenting his result before NKS was published, because he claimed that publishing this result violated an NDA Cook signed.

BTW, this provided insight into question exactly what was Wolfram's results and what was taken from his colleagues/employees.

It very much confused me when I first read about the court order: Did he really not have enough of his own results in NKS that he needed to hide the fact that the results were not originally his? And merely by asking the question, the answer seems obvious.

Other sources

The following were found directly or indirectly from a Google search of wolfram matthew cook lawsuit.

A brief mention and CA (cellular automata) background

Interesting, but about CAs (cellular automatas) and only briefly mentioning the lawsuit

• FOM: CAs, rule 110, NKS, and the wolfram vs cook lawsuit

Matthew Cook's (eventual) paper

Matthew Cook's paper – that triggered the lawsuit?:

• Universality in Elementary Cellular Automata by Matthew Cook

The abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to prove a conjecture made by Stephen Wolfram in 1985, that an elementary one dimensional cellular automaton known as "Rule 110" is capable of universal computation. I developed this proof of his conjecture while assisting Stephen Wolfram on research for A New Kind of Science [1].

The 'infamous' review

I think this is the 'infamous' review I've read before (several times):

• Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science

The opening:

The Bactra Review: Occasional and eclectic book reviews by Cosma Shalizi 132

A New Kind of Science

by Stephen Wolfram

Wolfram Media, 2002

---

A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity

Attention conservation notice: Once, I was one of the authors of a paper on cellular automata. Lawyers for Wolfram Research Inc. threatened to sue me, my co-authors and our employer, because one of our citations referred to a certain mathematical proof, and they claimed the existence of this proof was a trade secret of Wolfram Research. I am sorry to say that our employer knuckled under, and so did we, and we replaced that version of the paper with another, without the offending citation. I think my judgments on Wolfram and his works are accurate, but they're not disinterested.

The lawsuit:

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.)

Of course, lots of professors add their names to their students' papers, and many lab-chiefs owe their enviable publication records to the fact that they automatically add their names to the end of every manuscript prepared under their command. If Wolfram did that, he would merely be perpetuating one of the more common abuses of the current scientific community. But to deny Cook any authorship, and to threaten people with lawsuits to keep things quiet, is indeed very low. Happily, the suit between Wolfram and Cook has finally been resolved, and Cook's paper has been published, under his own name, in Wolfram's journal Complex Systems.

From the notes of NKS (A New Kind of Science)

Historical Notes from Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science:

From: Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science<br/> Notes for Chapter 11: The Notion of Computation<br/> Section: The Rule 110 Cellular Automaton<br/> Page 1115

History [of universal 1D cellular automata]. The fact that 1D cellular automata can be universal was discussed by Alvy Ray Smith in 1970 - who set up an 18-color nearest-neighbor cellular automaton rule capable of emulating Marvin Minsky’s 7-state 4-color universal Turing machine (see page 706). (Roger Banks also mentioned in 1970 a 17-color cellular automaton that he believed was universal.) But without any particular reason to think it would be interesting, almost nothing was done on finding simpler universal 1D cellular automata. In 1984 I suggested that cellular automata showing what I called class 4 behavior should be universal - and I identified some simple rules (such as k=2, r=2 totalistic code 20) as explicit candidates. A piece published in Scientific American in 1985 describing my interest in finding simple 1D universal cellular automata led me to receive a large number of proofs of the fact (already well known to me) that 1D cellular automata can in principle emulate Turing machines. In 1989 Kristian Lindgren and Mats Nordahl constructed a 7-color nearest-neighbor cellular automaton that could emulate Minsky’s 7,4 universal Turing machine, and showed that in general a rule with s + k + 2 colors could emulate an s-state k-color Turing machine (compare page 658). Following my ideas about class 4 cellular automata I had come by 1985 to suspect that rule 110 must be universal. And when I started working on the writing of this book in 1991, I decided to try to establish this for certain. The general outline of what had to be done was fairly clear - but there were an immense number of details to be handled, and I asked a young assistant of mine named Matthew Cook to investigate them. 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. Like most proofs of universality, the final proof he found is conceptually quite straightforward, but is filled with many excruciatingly elaborate details. And among these details it is certainly possible that a few errors still remain. But if so, I believe that they can be overcome by the same general methods that have been used in the proof so far. Quite probably a somewhat simpler proof can be given, but as discussed on page 722 it is essentially inevitable that proofs of universality must be at least somewhat complicated. In the future it should be possible to give a proof in a form that can be checked completely by computer. (The initial conditions in the note below quite soon become too large to run explicitly on any existing computer.) And in addition, with sufficient effort, I believe one should be able to construct an automated system that will allow many universality proofs of this general kind to be found almost entirely by computer (compare page 810).

Pretty off-topic

This was fun:

• elzr/blag: Wolfram & Feynman

Richard Feynman gave Wolfram some very warm advice about the latter running an institute – Wolfram didn't follow the advice and (arguably) proved Feynman wrong!

It was linked-to here, which didn't have anything interesting about the lawsuit:

• Wolfram's 'A New Kind Of Science" : A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity : programming

Wikipedia

Matthew Cook's Wikipedia page:

• Matthew Cook - Wikipedia

From it:

Work with Stephen Wolfram

In the 1990s Cook worked as a research assistant to Stephen Wolfram, assisting with work on Wolfram's book, A New Kind of Science. Among other things, he developed a proof showing that the Rule 110 cellular automaton is Turing-complete.

Cook presented his proof at the Santa Fe Institute conference CA98 before the publishing of Wolfram's book—an action that led Wolfram Research to accuse Cook of violating his NDA and resulted in the blocking of the publication of the proof in the conference proceedings. [1]

A New Kind of Science was released in 2002 with an outline of the proof. In 2004, Cook published his proof in Wolfram's journal Complex Systems.[2]

Summary

My theory/hypothesis:

1. Wolfram employed Matthew Cook.
2. (Stephen) Wolfram assigned Matthew Cook the project of constructing a proof (hypothetical computer program) of the universality of Rule 110.
3. (Stephen) Wolfram and others assisted with and supported Cook's eventual (possibly correct) proof.
4. Matthew Cook published a paper about his proof but (Stephen) Wolfram did not want him to do that and sued to block the publishing of the paper.
5. Wolfram also "threatened to sue" the authors of another paper that cited Cook's paper and those other authors removed the citation under that threat.
6. The lawsuit was long (~3.5 years) and boring and the two parties eventually settled.
7. NKS was released in 2002.
8. Cook published his proof in Wolfram's journal Complex Systems in 2004.

I think it was reasonable, if not a preference I think I would have shared, for Stephen Wolfram to block the publishing of Cook's paper until after NKS had been released. I think Wolfram just wanted to reveal (the existence of) the proof in NKS first. I strongly suspect that Cook's employment agreements (e.g. an NDA) did in fact obligate him to NOT publish his paper without permission from his employer.