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.
I had read this well known review:
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/
"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?