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Math Science Technology

Interviews: Ask Stephen Wolfram a Question 210

Posted by samzenpus from the go-ahead-and-ask dept.
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.
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Interviews: Ask Stephen Wolfram a Question More

Interviews: Ask Stephen Wolfram a Question

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  • How much RAM is a wolf supposed to have?

    Signed,
    Dr. Algernop Krieger.

    • How much RAM would a wolfram ram if a wolfram could ram RAM?

  • What's the biggest useful future challenge in mathematics for the next 25 years?

  • Why not open source wolfram alpha? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Karganeth ( 1017580 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @02:31PM (#49074683)
    If you want to advance mathematics you must show your working.
  • How "Angel" is doing.

  • Wolfram Language and AI (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    How can Wolfram Language improve Artificial Intelligence?

  • What's Next for the Wolfram Language? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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?

    • (e.g direct cortex interfaces et al) that will be available soon.

      That's optimism.

  • What of Orch-OR and Penrose? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xtal ( 49134 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @02:38PM (#49074759)

    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)

      by Prune ( 557140 )
      In his younger years, Penrose was brilliant and made great contributions to mathematical physics. But virtually every serious physicist looks down on Orch-OR, and the only reason you don't hear the word "crackpot" being thrown around too much. His arguments for even needing such a proposal were discredited a good way back before he even hooked up with Hameroff, when he wrote Emperor's New Mind and Shadows of the Mind. A combination of wishful thinking for a non-computational basis for reality that allows hu

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Prune ( 557140 )
        Oops, didn't proof-read. It should have been "...being thrown around too much is due to respect he earned in the past."
      • Enthusiastically read "Emperor's New Mind" when it hit the bookstores. I was expecting something brilliant from Penrose but was very disappointed with the metaphysical contents. Many brilliant people engage in wild speculation, I think to some degree it comes with the gift of genius. For instance the vast bulk of Newton's papers were theological rants, full of wacky claims such as "Jesus was sent to Earth to operate the levers of gravity". He also wrote almost a million words on the numerology of 666. Of co

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Prune ( 557140 )

          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]

      • 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)

    by kruach aum ( 1934852 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @02:39PM (#49074779)

    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?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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

  • What is the most important thing everybody should understand about cellular automata?
  • Will you please do something with http://www.cyc.com/ [cyc.com] and bring the ability to just talk to our computers in natural language? Not like Siri, but like the computer in ST:TNG.
  • I am not sure if we will get some personal answers out of this guy, I guess he will just forware every single question into one of these websites that claim to know everything [wolframalpha.com]. Serioudly, though, what do you think of Elon Musk's fear of A.I. [washingtonpost.com], and when do you think that Wolfram Alpha will become self aware?

  • 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:

    "I think relation-arithmetic important, not only as an interesting generalization, but because it supplies a symbolic technique required for dealing with structure. It has seemed to me that those who are not familiar

  • Cellular Automata and Reality? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @03:03PM (#49074971)

    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)

    by Thud457 ( 234763 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @03:03PM (#49074979) Homepage Journal
    It seems like we have many smart people warning us about the dangers of AI. What's your opinion on the prospects?

  • 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

  • What is the speed of light in inches per fortnight?

  • I discovered a very simple proof of Fermat's Last Theorem but every PHD genius I have shown it to have said that they cannot verify that it is absolutely correct. Yet they don't deny that the resulting mathematics shows an irresolvable paradox of basic arithmetic. 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. I've lost all regard for the 'academic industry' for it seems to be populated with 'mathematical hi

    • Why care what those people think? Just publish your proof and show them up.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Prune ( 557140 )
      You realize your post raises several of the classic red flags of a crackpot, right?

    • 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.

  • 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

    • Not really Android, but the Raspbian OS images for Raspberry Pi come with a free (noncommercial use only) Mathematica version that will work offline. The GUI is rather slow, but it seems that the command-line engine is okay.

  • 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? ;-)

  • When I saw you and your son at the NY maker faire a couple years ago, your son - I believe he was around 13 at the time - did a demo on how to program a hexacopter to fly autonomously using WA. My son, who is a few years older, figured the kid was heading to Oxford by 15. Just wondering what the lad has been up to.

  • Alpha not so great. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fortunatus ( 445210 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @03:53PM (#49075487)

    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.

  • 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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @04:09PM (#49075613)

    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)

    by Marginal Coward ( 3557951 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @04:13PM (#49075649)

    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?

  • 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

    • Bioinformatics has already standardized on open source tools (R, MySQL, Python). We weren't not buying anything that Wolfram might try to sell.

      • 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

  • Since entropy in a region of finite extent and energy is bounded, it would appear that arbitrary precision real numbers are not physically realizable (otherwise, you would be able to store infinite information in a real-valued physical quantity, violating the bound). Unless one is a mathematical platonist (a religious position), that means real numbers don't exist. So why is it considered acceptable, other than for historic and/or wishful thinking reasons, to think about real numbers in a more serious manne

    • 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)

    by iliketrash ( 624051 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @04:57PM (#49076033)

    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

  • I mean $300 for "hobbyist" software with zero support? C'mon.
  • I very much enjoyed "A New Kind of Science" -- thank you. Despite the criticisms (in some cases fair), it is an astounding achievement. In it, you write that you believe that the methods developed in your book could lead to a fundamental theory of the Universe. Has your opinion on this subject changed and has there been any progress (of which you're aware) along these lines?
  • How do you feel about the proposal to use Wolfram as an unit measure for Ego? http://www.aleph.se/andart/arc... [aleph.se]

  • Math and the Universe (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sycodon ( 149926 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @06:22PM (#49076747)

    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?

  • 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?

  • Should wolfram's tech support be as advanced as wofram's products?

  • How close are we / you from a human-reasoning grade computer?
  • What questions are you asking?

  • 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

  • How do you think will Quantum Computers or more specifically Quantum Cellular Automatons impact IT?

  • How close are we to being able to have the kind of system you discuss in your TED talk on computing a theory of all knowledge [ted.com], and how do you think we could use this kind of approach in practice to improve the reliability of information that people are reading on the web? How would you suggest it might be integrated within the current framework to provide possible utility outside of the Wolfram Alpha site itself, if at all?
  • Some mathematical savants express a type of mathematical synesthesia. That is, numbers are experienced as having textures, colors and shapes. Have you experienced this? How can this effect can be leveraged as an educational tool for the general public?
  • How would you explain the relationship between music and mathematics? How can this relationship be leveraged to help reduce innumeracy? (For example a two dimensional touch screen can be used as a visual theremin where each axis plays a frequency. The frequencies can be continuous or as steps in integer ratios corresponding to chromatic, pentatonic, pythagorean, blues, arabic and other musical scales. [wikipedia.org])

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