Interviews: Ask Stephen Wolfram a Question 210
Stephen Wolfram's accomplishments and contributions to science and computing are numerous. He earned a PhD in particle physics from Caltech at 20, and has been cited by over 30,000 research publications. Wolfram is the the author of A New Kind of Science, creator of Mathematica, the creator of Wolfram Alpha, and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. He developed Wolfram Language, a general multi-paradigm programming language, in 2014. Stephen has graciously agreed to answer any questions you may have for him. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.
Here's a question (Score:2, Funny)
How much RAM is a wolf supposed to have?
Signed,
Dr. Algernop Krieger.
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Interesting story behind that... [theodoregray.com] Theodore Gray was one of the cofounders of Wolfram Research with Stephen Wolfram. Apparently long ago there was a brewing trademark battle with another company over the Wolfram name. He resolved it by convincing the other company to go with Tellurium for their name (without mentioning that tellurium is a toxic metal that gives people exposed to it nasty, chronic BO)
Biggest useful future mathematical challenge (Score:1)
What's the biggest useful future challenge in mathematics for the next 25 years?
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Why not open source wolfram alpha? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Because he runs a business not a hippy commune.
But he has pretensions towards being a respected visionary scientist. It's not impossible to have it both ways, but it's really, really difficult. (Especially when you've taken the work you did as a student at a public university and commercialized it without giving a penny to the university.)
Re:Why not open source wolfram alpha? (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree here. This fellow looks like he is good at self-aggrandizement to gather shekels shucking ultra expensive software. I don't like this giant list of pedigree either. Solve problems or help others solve problems. To be fair, mathematica helps others solve problems BUT:
The licensing model is extortionary, its rental software, and it even tries to limit the users by how many API calls are made per month.
Also as others have pointed out because it is black box software its not really auditable.
I find a man who has made as much money as him being as greedy and self aggrandizing as he is today to be petty and money-lusting.
His book is roundly and rightfully savaged in reviews, check them out on Amazon. I will not be linking to it as this guy doesnt need more money pouring in.
I have a startup where our algorithms guy pays the mathematica fine every year. But lets be clear, algorithms guy does 99.9% of the work here and a good part of that is perspiration.
Wolfram just cashes checks - so with all due respect, lets not put this guy on a pedestal.
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That having been said, Mathematica was already pretty much fully written as of 1991---I know because I used it. It was among the first to have exectuables for both Windows and Linux. And it worked fabulously. I wrote scientific articles using it a
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In principle Wolfram could earn his money with a different business model (e.g. working in research or as a consultant...)
And just up and fires his ~700 employees?
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Or he can just not take your terrible advice.
I would ask him (Score:2)
Wolfram Language and AI (Score:1)
How can Wolfram Language improve Artificial Intelligence?
What's Next for the Wolfram Language? (Score:1)
What are some of the latest developments you have been working on? What can we expect later this year?
P.S. We met at HackBCA where I got to try the Wolfram Language.
High level programming (Score:2, Interesting)
I am concerned that we have not, nor will reach the the high level programming language and data presentation formats necessary to accomodate the advances in HMI (e.g direct cortex interfaces et al) that will be available soon. That we are still thinking keyboards and screens. What are your thoughts on this and the ramifications on code language, OS and presentation?
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(e.g direct cortex interfaces et al) that will be available soon.
That's optimism.
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the development of higher-level compilers became classified in the 1970's
What higher level compilers are you talking about? Compiler-theory was fairly well understood by the 1970s....
What of Orch-OR and Penrose? (Score:4, Interesting)
As you probably know, the most recent paper on Orch-OR as a proposed mechanism for consciousness may have a role for cellular automata in the underlying mechanism.
As you've advocated and made a compelling case for these systems, what are your thoughts on this?
Mod parent down (Score:3, Interesting)
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neural nets do appear to be insufficient to reproduce consciousness
As in the case of his other arguments, most disagree with this. In any case, I suggest looking not to physics when trying to explain consciousness, but neuroscience. This is from one of the top neuroscientists: http://www.amazon.com/Self-Com... [amazon.com] Specifically in terms of physics, similar arguments that the basics of physics and consciousness are intertwined are destroyed in this paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/... [arxiv.org]
Have you read the article in question? (Score:2)
I don't think so.
Ad hominem attacks are lame.
If you have brilliant insight, please cite objections to the paper in question, which is quite interesting, and has enough experimental data to at least merit discourse.
If you HAD read the paper in question, you would understand the context I am asking the question. I doubt you have.
Clamouring to "mod parent down" smacks of professional jealosy or perhaps some other more basic inadquacy.
What do you like about physics? (Score:3)
To get a PhD at 20 I imagine you've spent a lot of your childhood reading and doing maths and physics. What is it about physics that draws you? Why does it keep you interested?
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My life goal is to create an advanced robot that is, by all appearances, human. And then I will have sex with it, forever. Everything I've done with my life, all the math, getting my PhD at 20, my businesses...it's all to achieve that goal.
-Stephen Wolfram
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(insert Futurama's "Don't Date Robots" propaganda video here)
not as lulzy as one would expect... (Score:2)
The one thing (Score:1)
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Natural Language Interface (Score:2)
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Oh yeah, can't wait for that [youtube.com].
Wolfram Alpha (Score:2)
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Relation Arithmetic and Dimensional Analysis (Score:2)
The penultimate paper of "Bit-string Physics: A Finite and Discrete Approach to Natural Philosophy" [google.com] discusses an attempted revival of "Relation Arithmetic" [boundaryinstitute.org] with which Russell and Whitehead had planned to cap off their Principia Mathematica in its final volume.
Of Relation Arithmetic, Russel said:
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Right. There is a long history of dimensions as after-thought/addon to languages going back to the PLATO system's TUTOR programming language circa 1972. Russell's Relation Arithmetic starts with relational structure and defines equivalence classes of structure as numbers in the arithmetic of relations. Its an entirely different, and correct, approach.
Cellular Automata and Reality? (Score:3, Interesting)
You have dedicated a large slice of your time to investigating CA properties and trajectories. So has my friend John Horton Conway who dedicated a slice of his life to Life. However, in your case you seem to have held the belief that CAs in some fundamental way underpin our physical reality. Do you still hold this belief, and if so, could you expand a bit on the current state of your opinions on this matter?
Edmund Ronald.
How do we get ourselves out of this mess? (Score:4, Insightful)
Naming? (Score:2)
Since you tend to name things after yourself, do you regret not naming Mathematica differently?
The first question is a joke, nothing one would ask in polite conversation. My real question to him is this:
I assume it was a pivotal moment in your life when Veltman showed you Schoonship, which was essential to the work later earning him a Nobel with t'Hooft. It was probably the first computer algebra system able to transform the large expressions that you had to deal with in your preceding work on particle phy
Question (Score:2)
What is the speed of light in inches per fortnight?
Question - Is Fermat's Last Theorem Dead? (Score:1)
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Why care what those people think? Just publish your proof and show them up.
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Then post your proof to the Internet and link to it on places that discuss math/science topics. You'll get plenty of feedback. But then that would require actually proving you have this mystical proof.
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Another excuse. First it's some conspiracy of the "acadrmic industry", then it's the imaginary requirement of an academic email for why you don't post to arXiv, and now it's some claim of your credit being stolen. And you wonder why no one buys your story?
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Because you act like one of those infomercial snake-oil people.
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arXiv asks that you get an endorsement if you don't have an academic affiliation. What you claim has never been true.
I completely agree (Score:2)
There is only so much you can do when a small group control everything. Better theories are the very last thing they want.
Good luck.
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That's because they encounter tons of quacks like this guy and his elusive proof.
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I will also allow the possibility that this guy's theory is a work of pure genius.
Calling someone a "quack like this guy", without any reason to do so, is embarrassing to those of us trying to be objective and scientific. However it is surprisingly common among academics.
I have seen outright hostility. I have seen expressed interest that leads to non-communication without reasons. I have had the "crackpot" label leveled against me.
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Calling someone a "quack like this guy", without any reason to do so, is embarrassing to those of us trying to be objective and scientific. However it is surprisingly common among academics.
He's given plenty of reasons for being called a quack. Mythical proof that he won't share in public, invents academic conspiracies, won't post it to places like arXiv for made-up and patently false reasons, and then falls back to wanting to keep it to himself so that he can work on it alone and because someone is going to steal credit for it. Those are all tell-tale signs of quackery.
I have seen outright hostility. I have seen expressed interest that leads to non-communication without reasons. I have had the "crackpot" label leveled against me. And I have seen, above all else, a total lack of expressed interest or any effort at analysis, by academics.
I'm sure you have, but that's because there are tons of charlatans out there hawking phony proofs. You actually have to work
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You're doing it again.
This can be the fallback of the quack.
This can also be the simple truth.
Most people do not like having their world turned upside down. People who have spent their career doing something, anything, do not like hearing of a better way...if that better way disrupts their world, threatens their income or otherwise challenges them more than they would like.
If any of that last paragraph is news to you, then welcome to the real world.
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It seems everyone wants a 'trophy proof' in excess of a billion pages (my proof is two pages) to wave around to the fawning mathematical community.
Huh?
how is them not being able to check your 2 page proof the same as them wanting a billion page proof?
Anyway, I'm no genius, but if it's a 2 page proof, why not link to it here. Sounds interesting, if it's correct.
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Because he's now apparently afraid someone is going to steal credit for it: http://features.slashdot.org/c... [slashdot.org]
Basically he's going to keep making excuses for why he won't publicly publish this supposed proof.
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He scores high on the crank test
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/... [ucr.edu]
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There is no doubt the guy's a crank.
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I've tried to post to arXiv.org but they demand an academic email address.
If true, why is this "demand" not listed on either their page about about registering or on the registration form [arxiv.org]? Even their primer [arxiv.org] lists no such "demand". The only thing required if you don't have an recognized academic affiliation is to get an endorsement in order for them to process your submission. As the person below said, this reeks of quackery.
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Hmm, seems my link to the registration help page [arxiv.org] got dropped.
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arXiv does not require an academic email.
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Actually in some sub-areas they got totally swamped by crackpots and spam and so had some sort of system of vouching. I don't remember which area, however and pretty much all you needed to do was to demonstrate you weren't a spammer or total lunatic.
I don't kow which though because my sub area never had that happen.
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Yeah, you have to get an endorsement to post in those cases, but it's never really that hard to get if you have something of value to post. This guy is just inventing reasons for why he's going to hiding his mystical proof.
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*keep hiding*
Offline Mathematica for Android Please (Score:2)
Mathematica use to run great offline on Win 3.1 on 486 platforms, which have a small fraction of the capability and resources of a modern smart phone.
True that the current version of mathematica does so much more, but even an older strip download offline version would be so much more than the countless Android & iOS CAS apps in the App/Play stores.
I purchased Wolfram Alpha which is decent for compution, but often when I need it most, especially for big number modulo calculations, I don't have an Interne
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Age difficulties? (Score:2)
How would you characterize your college experience? As you were so young it must have been difficult to engage in those crucial interactions with your peers outside of class, eg dinners out, parties where alcohol was involved, etc. Or were you more like the kid in the "Revenge of The Nerds" movie? ;-)
Your prodigy? (Score:1)
Alpha not so great. (Score:5, Interesting)
I know this will hit my karma, but here goes..
I'd ask Wolfram: Why do you say Alpha is so great. I understand it's hard. So then be clear about what it's good at. Why do you represent as if it's some all knowing AI when it goes to crap for any question that any self respecting SciFi fan would ask first?
It does really, really well with the examples that Wolfram uses in his introductory video. I get great results when I ask a stock market question, sure. I also get great stock market analysis results from Yahoo, Google, and e*Trade. In response to every other question I ask it I get crap. It typically has little data on my areas of interest, so it seems to dumb down the parse on my question to make a search *for* crap. So then it returns crap. Charted in one or two ways.
I want to ask things that would help me pilot a space ship, or at least help me understand NASA's proposals to the U.S. Congress. For instance, "How do I plot a course from earth to Uranus?" I just this moment typed that in, and guess what - complete crap. It returned a plot of x^2, and nary a mention of gravity or planets or time anything else. How did it manage to parse a question about a course from Earth to Uranus and decide x^2 was the best item to present?
Look what it says about its parse of my question: "Using closest Wolfram|Alpha interpretation: how do I plot a". What? "How do I plot a"? I did type a subject, folks! It didn't even try to get to the planets, orbits, gravity, anything. IT DIDN'T EVEN TRY! I see that if there are no knowledge frames in the system pertaining to my query, it seems likely to chop down the input. I'm learning more about how Alpha is implemented than I am learning about my query!!
Can't it at least show any historical paths that spacecraft have used between the planets? Can't it even show the planets? Can't it even cite procedural texts on how to do it? Can't it mention some of the factors that must be considered? I would like the result from an all-knowing AI to be an applet that shows a spaghetti line stretching out among the bodies of the solar system, and I would like to be able to adjust the launch date and see the planets move and see what happens to the spaghetti line.
BTW, that little Game of Life CA that displays while I'm waiting for my answer. Ha ha. I guess that's so cool. I confess, it does make me feel that some really thoughtful process is going on, just what marketing wants. For all that, what comes back - crap. Just makes it all the more disappointing.
Re:Alpha not so great. (Score:4, Informative)
For instance, "How do I plot a course from earth to Uranus?"
The really tragic thing about this particular example is that Alpha could just return (and indeed to any question involving Uranus):
"To plot a course to my anus, you're going to need to start by buying me a drink"
Thanks folks, I'll be here all night.
Wolfram Alpha (Score:2)
I've tried Wolfram Alpha several times over the years, and I have never been able to find any value in it. For example, I've just put in "FIR filter", and it comes up with nothing, saying only "Development of this topic is under investigation..." However, every major search engine provides lots of information about that topic.
Next, I tried one of the examples provided by retrieving stock information about GE. I then selected "Ratios", and most of the resulting output fields were blank. This correlates wi
Why is Wolfram such an unpleasant place to work? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wolfram Research is known around town (Champaign-Urbana) as a pretty unpleasant work environment. (See some of the comments here [birdeye.com].) Why do you run a business this way? Is this on purpose, or is it possibly that your management skills aren't as good as your math skills?
Posting anonymously because C-U is a pretty small town.....
A New Kind of Science (Score:4, Insightful)
Your idea of "A New Kind of Science" received a lot of publicity when it first came out, but doesn't seem to have really caught on in the years since. Is the idea wrong, or has the rest of the science world simply not caught up with you? Do you know of any serious scientific investigations or developments that have resulted from it so far?
In comparison, Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity took a few decades to find its first experimental proof, and to eventually be fully accepted by science. Do you see that sort of process occurring with your idea, or is it dying on the vine?
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Sorry it I was a little bit off. My apologies to you and all the other Anonymous Cowards of the universe. I wrote that stuff from memory based on some TV shows I saw. Also, please note that I specifically referenced the Special Theory of Relativity, which Wikipedia indicates was published in 1905. So relative to your information, perhaps I should have said "decade" rather than "decades". Again, I apologize.
Regardless of your anonymous and cowardly nitpicking, my basic point remains that no "new kind of
Mathematica Community Development (Score:2)
One of the challenges facing biological scientists is the need to develop and employ diverse data structures, as well as use analytic techniques that often require rather advanced mathematical and statistical methods and theory that span multiple disciplines. In biology there is a wide spectrum of computer languages available and used to pursue such requirements. Although Mathematica has the potential for much wider application as some of the demonstration project, training videos, and example code on the
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Saying bioinformatics has "standardized" on open source tools is a bit of a stretch, but there is no doubt that the tools you mention are very widely used. That said, bioinformatics is a very small fraction of the activity going on in the biological sciences.
In may ways this is a bit of a shame, as Mathematica's computational capabilities are exceed those that the other open source languages you mention can do, without tremendous programming effort. Indeed, its precisely why I pose the question, since it
Finitism (Score:2)
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There's nothing real or physical about maths. Maths is all about what you can imagine. I can try to imagine infinities. I can try to imagine a number that squares to give -1. I can try to imagine all sorts of things :)
The beauty of maths is that it is not linked ot the real world. It's the ultimate game and it is as crazy, subversive and downright strange as your imagination will allow.
It's its curse that it's also useful.
Frequency of Mathematica bug-fix updates (Score:3)
About 15 years ago I found a bug that affected all Fourier-like transforms in Mathematica. (It was related to how the constants can be “allocated” between the exponent and an overall scale factor—someone had tried to generalize this concept by being too clever by half, and made a mistake.) I did a sanity check with comp.lang.mathematica or whatever the group is called and then filed a bug report. I understand that the error was not corrected until a later major release of Mathematica.
A few months ago I returned to Mathematica with a medium-sized project which involves some probabability calculations (PDFs, characteristic functions, etc.) I quickly found that Mathematica failed to crack an integral because it did not do a simple, trivial, second-semester substitution. I also found an error in the way a special function (MeijerG) is calculated numerically. In all, after only about three weeks of returning to using Mathematica, I filed five bug reports (one of which was UI-related) and have two or three saved up for when I get more time. I have watched the Mathematica release cycle for some years including the “dot” releases, and I am not encouraged that any of my reported bugs will be addressed before the next major release. (I believe that would be version 11.)
I have finally drank enough Kook-Aide to appreciate Mathematica and indeed have rather quickly (after my recent return) found it indespensible in my work; I am no longer even tussling with whether to use Octave/Matlab or Python/NumPy/SciPy for numerical work.
So: Why does Wolfram respond so slowly to bug reports? There seem to be only one x.1 or x.0.1 release after each major release, if that. Why not release more-frequent bug fixes like most other software houses, rather than let bugs exist for years in some cases?
Erim Radcliff
Why the laughable prices? (Score:2)
Future of Physics (Score:2)
Wolfram as an measure unit of Ego (Score:2)
Math and the Universe (Score:4, Interesting)
In Carl Sagan's book Contact, Dr. Ellie Arroway mathematically proved that Pi, calculated out to some huge number, had a series of 1 and 0 that when arranged in a raster, formed a circle, supposedly showing that the universe was not an accident.
While this is obviously fiction, is there any Mathematical equation, theorem, or any other aspect of Math that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up or otherwise cause you to wonder?
What happened to "space-time network" ? (Score:2)
You had an interesting essay "My Hobby: Hunting for Our Universe" on your blog in 2007 [wolfram.com] about modeling fundamental Planck scale physics via random networks (this was also mentioned in your NKS books). I didn't see anything written or spoken on that topic later. Did that project ever yield any recognizable physics or was it abandoned?
Wolfram tech support (Score:2)
Should wolfram's tech support be as advanced as wofram's products?
Human reasoning (Score:2)
What Interests You Today? (Score:2)
Formal Proving of Computer Algebra Answers (Score:2)
One of the frequent concerns I remember from my days in physics (where Mathematica was frequently and heavily used) was the question of how scientists could trust the results of the program. To the best of my knowledge, (although I must concede my knowledge is some years out of date) no computer algebra system is currently regarded as being bug free. There is always the question: "how do I know that I got the right answer *this* time?"
While auditing the logic of one of the open source systems (Axiom, Max
Quantum Cellular Automatons and Quantum Computing (Score:2)
How do you think will Quantum Computers or more specifically Quantum Cellular Automatons impact IT?
Knowledge Networks (Score:2)
Mathematical Synesthesia (Score:2)
Music and mathematics (Score:2)
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"missing line number prefix at line 2"
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What if the answer if "no sugary drinks of any kind"? Does that destroy your little pre-conceived world where everyone fits inside neat little boxes?
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Both of those are available without any sugar.
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Oh, aspergers are good with butter.
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If it's full of self-aggrandizement you know it's Stephen Wolfram.
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The ego that burns twice as bright burns half as long.
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Mathematics already has the concept of multi valued functions like square root, for example.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki... [wikipedia.org]
0/0 is undefined because you can reach literally any real number for 0/0 by taking a limit of a carefully selected function. For example, sin x/x winds up at 0/0 but has the value 1 at x=0. Now if you want 0/0 to equal some arbitrary number, multiply that expansion by the number and take the limit.
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One function in all of mathematics begs that it be developed further. :-)
That's a great example of sin x/x. I'm hoping that Calculas would be extended that equations like this wouldn't be undefined.