Ack! You're killing me! :-) Penrose was a very bright physicist who should have NEVER have dabbled in AI and computational theory. The Emperor's New Mind is riddled with some subtle and not so subtle fundamental flaws. You can find rigorous slicing-n-dicing of his book by other mathematicians on the Internet; he has been pretty thoroughly lambasted for publishing that tripe, but then, it isn't an area of mathematics that he is particularly competent at. But it drives people who work in computational theory and cognitive science crazy because so many people have read that book. It is easy to find it plausible if you aren't too familiar with the mathematics, but it is definitely incorrect. When he talks about about AI, Penrose kind of loses his mind and waxes mystical without a real clue what he is talking about.
I'll let this one slide, but please don't consider that book an authoritative reference on anything. :-)
The history of AI is somewhat twisted in that for most of the 20th century, there was no mathematical theory of intelligence; attempts at AI were mostly blind shots in the dark hoping to get lucky. Recently, some very important breakthroughs have been made and some hard problems and conjectures have been solved. We actually have something resembling a very clear roadmap to AI for the first time and this has led to flurry of advancements in the last year or two. After being a pariah for a very long time, there is quite a bit of very smart money quietly being dumped into it based on recent developments. I'm extremely optimistic; everything is falling into place and a lot of questions are being answered where the theory actually maps well to what we know about the human brain. It just wasn't in any way that people imagined.
I do believe a Mathematical Theory of Everything is possible - along the lines outlined by Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. Some Freepers laugh at me for being hopeful that a primordial algorithm will be discovered.
You are on a roll tonight. Mind you, I don't consider finding a primordial structure/algorithm to be all that foolish. I know enough to know not to dismiss it out of hand, though I won't venture to speculate at this point. Fortunately, Wolfram isn't as bad as Penrose; at least his math is valid and in some cases quite interesting. Unfortunately, Wolfram can't see past his own ego. As many other critics of the book have pointed out, there was only little really new in it if you were actually in the field and a lot of it had been published ten to twenty years ago. Also, there are quite a few allegations that he "appropriated" other people's ideas for his book without proper attribution. I have a mathematician friend who is very familiar with that field of mathematics and he was totally underwhelmed by the book. From the standpoint of importance it was all hype and no substance. My basic critique of his ideas are that there are alternatives to his ideas that are actually more elegant and more useful, but which he seems to ignore; even if some of the ideas are right, his version of them are almost certainly wrong. Wolfram is pretty much wedded to the ideas in his book, having worked with them for most of his life, and seems to have missed some really important developments in mathematics.
To put some kind of context on it, I would consider Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, and Bach" to be a far more seminal work than either of the two books you mention.
That said, there are some very deep and fundamental mathematical structures that cut across most fields of mathematics which you could consider to be something like the underlying algorithms of the universe. But I don't think they really look that much like Wolfram's vision. Nonetheless, I love this kind of stuff, and apparently so do many Freepers. :-)
Is that by any chance why your Freeper handle is "tortoise?"
I have read a number of disparaging reviews of both Penrose's Emporer's New Mind and Wolfram's A New Kind of Science.
Admittedly I have discounted all of them simply because - on closer inspection - every author of such reviews, which I read, had a vested interest to the contrary.
As an example, when a few Geologists observed that the erosion on the Sphinx was such that it would predate history attributed by Egyptologists - the reaction was swift, vigorous and indignate. We see the same kind of reaction when evolution is challenged by Intellectual Design. As Shakespeare might have said “methinks they protest too much” and thus some of us on the outside wonder why.
Inquiry is not a threat to truth; therefore, objection to inquiry is prima facie cause for such inquiry.