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The work challenges widespread claims that Lovelace's mathematical abilities were more "poetical" than practical, or indeed that her knowledge was so limited that Babbage himself was likely to have been the author of the paper that bears her name. The authors pinpoint Lovelace's keen eye for detail, fascination with big questions, and flair for deep insights,

If you keep looking at the big picture, and have a flair for deep insights, soon you'll discover eye gone values and be as impressive as Malcolm Gladwell.

Wolfram did an analysis of her situation, and suggests that her capability was like that of a competent graduate student, ready to do some good work (and be a reliable manager for Babbage, who lacked self-management skills) if life (and death) hadn't intervened. The paper talks about "exploding myths" but it doesn't really, Lovlace is already extremely well revered by many, and the people who claim she is overrated are in the minority.

Indeed, and it appears that this is actually the goal of the project, per the original announcement
  http://blog.stephenwolfram.com...
The scary bit, is that many of the "novelties" there announced (i.e. homogeneous treatment of input, output and data, etc.) are actually quite old ideas in the arena of functional programming (lisp or scheme are built upon these foundations)... sometimes they work nicely; often you risk ending up with academic exercises.
I am myself not too keen on "revolutionary technologies" which should rather be considered "evolutionary developments" (even when the evolution actually provides something new and useful)!

What is new here should be the integration with a massive database of `facts' and the possibility of performing elaborate queries, relying on `ready-made' algorithms.
This is very convenient and potentially useful but
  a) it has little to do with `programming' per se; it is a programmatic interface to a knowledge-based system (where the knowledge itself includes also the algorithms being requested)
  b) it is opaque, in the sense that there is little control on what code is doing what data: many of the functions act actually as black boxes and it is not straightforward to see how to actually get in control of the system and/or understand what is actually being done in order to provide an answer.

A further remark: (b) is most of the time not required at all (we just want to get a rough picture of something), but it is essential e.g. for scientific applications.

Stephen Wolfram is not developing a new programming language.

"Wolfram" is the name recently adopted for the programming language which is used in Mathematica (which is an application), as (somewhat) explained here.

As explained if one traces the link in the story to its original sources, Wolfram, the language of Mathematica, is being extended to include some new features.

As previously noted, "Slashdot Editor" Nick Kolakowski is once again promoting his own "Business Intelligence" opinion pieces under the guise of the fake user Nerval's Lobster.

That's not to say that the data is without merit or interest. The issue here is that Slashdot's publication of the April 24 post on Wolfram's blog had to wait until after Kolakowski had offered his summary of it on April 26. Why did slashdot readers have to wait a few days for Kolakowski to write his own summary of the blog posting? What value did he add?

This is a distraction to get media focus back on Twitter because of the Google search plus announcement. Honestly Twitter shows me the Fail Whale about once a week and their service record is poor for such a large site - so what will they be complaining about next?

Google has been amassing tons of data and is now planning to use that to have personalized search - that is the story. I don't see how they will get around the filter bubble issue. (Never mind personal data protection and other issues.)

As a side I am still trying to wrap my head around Wolfram's blog today about using a TLD .data in relation to the Google announcement.

Bad day for the internet?

I am surprised it didn't hit Twitfail

Geeks + bikes always makes me a bit nervous, one of my high school math teachers was killed by a traffic accident he had while biking to school; and then as an adult I read about Jerry Keiper dying similarly.

And yes, being a fan of Bruce Schneier, I understand that this nervousness is probably not commensurate with the actual risks involved in traveling by bicycle.

Though coming from very different directions, both LQG pioneer Lee Smolin and Stephen Wolfram, who needs no introduction here, have opined that the best candidate as the fundamental level of a discrete physics (i.e. where the appearance of being continuous is emergent) is a graph theoretic network of nodes and links where it ceases to make sense to ask what they are made of. (This is also explored in Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder .) The basic idea is that there is some simple enough but cosmologically consistent transformation rule which produces the next local state of the graph from the current local state, supposedly at the Planck scale (of order 10^43 times per second).

A likely scenario is that "somewhere" long unreachable beyond our event horizons, there was a region of network sustaining chaotic inflationary expansion in which a bubble of more conservative physics emerged. Our conservative bubble only exhibits polynomial (near cubic) growth but that was enough to separate it from the exponentially growing seed graph.

My current betting is that Type 1a Supernovae, or at least some more precise analogue thereof in our parent cosmos, seed new outbreaks of chaotic inflation in which a new generation of more conservative bubble cosmoses arise, the whole process being susceptible to selection for fecundity and constrained only by the need for a viable history to some initial conditions simple enough to have just happened, presumably for no better reason than because nothing is unstable.

"I had no idea how long it would take for the prize to be won," said Stephen Wolfram. "It could have taken a year, a decade, or a century. I'm thrilled it was so quick. It's an impressive piece of work."

Alright, that last sentence there is pretty damning. I have heard time and time again on Slashdot that Wolfram just took other people's work, that he had people working underneath him

The charge against Wolfram is that he did not give credit to one of his assistants who proved that a particular 2 state 1 dimensional finite automaton with a neighborhood of 1 was universal. The assistant had also signed a contract that effectively prevented him from releasing the proof on the assistant's own.

& that he didn't actually know what he was talking about in his book. This is some corroborating evidence, in my opinion.

Wolfram's A New Kind of Science makes claims about facts in a wide variety of areas of science especially chaos theory (or nonlinear dynamics or whatever it's called this week) and biology which were either known, discovered by someone unaffiliated with Wolfram, or known to be false (the last being Wolfram's doomed program of a TOE based on network automata). Most of these problems arise from the tone of the book which does not make clear what's original about Wolfram's work (aside from exhaustive study of 1D automata and some simply axiom systems not much) and what is a review of other work. That doesn't mean Wolfram doesn't know what he's talking about, he knows quite a bit, but it's hard to parse that from what is conjecture and as in any major work of such length there are errors.

Wolfram is not the genius he makes himself out to be. I don't believe I will ever read "A New Kind of Science" as I have many other books in front of that one on my list.

Wolfram's reputation as a genius rests on his precociousness as a youth (Wolfram was educated at Eton, Oxford, and Caltech. He published his first scientific paper at the age of 15, and had received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech by the age of 20.) and some rather esoteric contributions to the field of particle physics. He also did some early and significant (although perhaps not as significant to other practitioners as to Wolfram himself) work on cellular automata and other discrete systems. A New Kind of Science was Wolfram's attempt to leap from being a bright but unknown outside of his field physicist/mathematician (eg. Ed Witten although since Wolfram didn't publish anything between the early 80's and 2004 or so the comparison is probably unfair to Witten) to Newton, Einstein, or at least Gauss or Euler levels of fame. He failed, but that doesn't mean there is no value in the book, it can serve as a launching point into various not otherwise popular fields of study. I recommend keeping the criticism of the book by area experts close at hand but the book itself can provoke questions and interest in non-experts although it's probably of little value to experts (as compared to the length of the tome).

Why don't give them credits for it, instead of stupidly saying: "well they just got lucky?".

Because one of the ways people have adapted to dealing with their lack of control over their environment is by telling ourselves we get better at understanding and influencing it over time. Some of us do actually get better, some of us don't, but almost all of us *believe* we do. We tend to extend this belief to our cultures and humanity as a whole. It's not only an ego boost to think we're smarter than those silly people who lived centuries ago, but a prop against the inherent insecurity of existence.

We are, of course, wrong (as you know). Humans fall and advance over time, but the ability to think about the world is still limited to what a human brain can consider, although we do use better tools to give us the results of complex data. I wish Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man was mandatory reading in high school; certainly every science major should read it.

P.S. Thanks for the Fibonacci description. I was going to put an NKS example, but this works perfectly to express how simple rules gets complex in no time :-)

That is somewhat negative. He could do very well. Think of musical prodigys including W.A Mozart. In more recent times; Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica http://www.stephenwolfram.com/about-sw/ "Born in London in 1959, Wolfram was educated at Eton, Oxford, and Caltech. He published his first scientific paper at the age of 15, and had received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech by the age of 20. --" Went on to create the computer algebra system http://www.wolfram.com/

pfft, as if that could ever happen. I mean, come on, who's ever heard of a scientist becoming a smug bastard because he was rushed through highschool and allowed to enter college early. Seriously, it's not like you can just be a jerk and still be treated with respect. You're certainly not gunna found any multimillion dollar companies and publish your own book because everyone with half a brain thinks you've lost it -- whilst the other half of the scienfic community think you might be onto something if only they could figure out what.

You sure that wasn't PDQ Bach?
http://www.schickele.com/pdqbio.htm

which you can compare/contrast with:
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/about-sw/

Here's Wolram's biblio on previous papers on cellular automata. Ed Fredkin was writing on the topic in 1965, 20 years before Wolfram. I think the ideas go further back than that.

Agree with heroic Hertzfeld (more info in Programmers at Work ). I'd add Warnock and also strongly endorse Wolfram (whose invincible iconoclasm is admirable). And PARC should be better represented, I'd cite Adele Goldberg for the under-appreciated Smalltalk-80. At least she gets to contribute to Cringely's Triumph of the Nerds.

Where are Dijkstra and Wirth (who did far more than most people realise - Wirth essentially created a European "Sun Microsystems" at ETH)? Remove the "+10:American" bias - but Knuth should probably be mentioned at least twice. :)

I wonder how you would classify Edison, with 1368 patents to his name but no formal scientific pedagogy.

A lot of scientists incorporate & turn into businessman/scientist - eg Benjamin Franklin, Dr. Stephen Wolfram ( Founder of Mathematica ), Dr. R & Dr. A ( invented the RSA cryptographic scheme, Carl Sagan, and a whole lot of people in biotech.

The skillsets to be both seem conflicting - businessmen need a Machiavellical sense of brutal realism, while scientists are pursuing truths in the gentler idealic realm of Plato.

In a different field now, but much of his pre-Mathematica work was in cosmology. A bunch more was in particle physics. From 1975 to 1983, Wolfram published a LOT of papers on those subjects.

His diversion into mathematical software came about because the existing systems could not handle the scale of problems he was working on, and so he and Chris Cole developed SMP ("Symbolic Mathematics Program").

Wolfram's willingness to go his own way, despite the conventional wisdom, can be seem in the development of SMP. Wolfram and Cole checked with the experts before starting SMP, and were told that such a system had to be written in LISP. C was not suited to that kind of programming, and if they tried it, they would fail. Wolfram and Cole realized that this was bullshit, wrote in C, and SMP completely blew away all the other symbolic mathematics programs of the day.

In a different field now, but much of his pre-Mathematica work was in cosmology. A bunch more was in particle physics. From 1975 to 1983, Wolfram published a LOT of papers on those subjects.

His diversion into mathematical software came about because the existing systems could not handle the scale of problems he was working on, and so he and Chris Cole developed SMP ("Symbolic Mathematics Program").

Wolfram's willingness to go his own way, despite the conventional wisdom, can be seem in the development of SMP. Wolfram and Cole checked with the experts before starting SMP, and were told that such a system had to be written in LISP. C was not suited to that kind of programming, and if they tried it, they would fail. Wolfram and Cole realized that this was bullshit, wrote in C, and SMP completely blew away all the other symbolic mathematics programs of the day.

He may be a smart guy, but I think he might just be recycling old material and calling it the Next Big Thing (TM)

This is quite true, notwithstanding the fact that he is precisely the source for much of this old material in the first place ! Wolfram is really a strange guy, and he does have weird ideas (especially on evolution), but at the end of the day he really started something deep.

Wolfram did not invent cellular automata, but he was the first one to study them in a scientific way. And he did find interesting things (papers here - caution, big hairy theoretical physics maths inside, but the central idea is quite clear) .

First: very simple rules (a 1-D cellular automaton in which each cell depends only on its current state and that of each of its neighbour) can lead to arbitrarily complex behaviours regardless of initial conditions. But this is not the really interesting thing.

Second: Possible behaviours for a simple cellular automaton can fall in 4 categories: frozen (nothing changes), periodic, chaotic (measurably chaotic behaviour in which no recognizable pattern appears), and most importantly "complex": patterns emerge, propagate through the system, interact together in complex and non-trivial ways. Conway's game of Life is the most famous exemple of a class-IV cellular automaton, but Wolfram found a few much simpler ones.

There is something deep there. You probably heard about "chaos theory". Well what Wolfram says is that this is not the really cool stuff. If you think of it, chaos is just as boring as frozen, non-changing states. If you modify something in a frozen state, well your modification either stays there forever, or is immediately swallowed into oblivion. In the chaotic state, any modification you make will instantaneously disappear in the general whirlwind.

But there is a small zone between these two extremes, in which a modification may give rise to patterns, structures, complex bursts of information that appear, grow, propagate and interact. This is what Doyne Farmer and Chris Langton later called the "Edge of Chaos", where interesting stuff can happen : an actual phase transition, often governed by a small set of parameters (possibly just one), between boring order and completely chaotic states. Around this pahase transition, interesting things can appear.

The world exist because the laws of physics are at the edge of chaos. Would the physical world be chaotic, no structure would ever appear, it would instantaneously be dissolved. In a frozen state, the universe is a black rock. Similaraly, life exists because chemistry is also on the edge of chaos. Molecules can assemble, interact in complex ways and produce order, patterns, structure.

There is something deep there. This guy, together with people like Chris Langton, Doyne Farmer, Stuart Kauffman, is one of the Founding Fathers of complexity sciences. "How do complex systems arise ? If I have a system, what are the condtions under which it can produce freeze, go straight away to chaos, or produce interesting things ? How do structures emerge in a given system ?" Take any paper by any of these four, and you immediately get into mind-boggling stuff. "Life, the universe, everything" - and it's a bit more complicated than 42.

Wolfram goes on. He (and his students) proved that even elementary cellular automaton can actually be universal Turing machines (unsurprisingly, these are class-IV automata). Thus the undecidability principle must be applied to them: you cannot guess, for a given cellular automaton, what the result will be after N iterations - or at least, you cannot do it with less calculations than it would take to actually perform these N calculations.

If such a simple thing as an elementary CA can give rise to universal computation, then universal computation and (most importantly) un

...skeptics will notice that, despite his flawless credentials, staggering intelligence, and depth of knowledge, Wolfram possesses many attributes of a pseudoscientist: (1) he makes grandiose claims, (2) works in isolation, (3) did not go through the normal peer-review process, (4) published his own book, (5) does not adequately acknowledge his predecessors, and (6) rejects a well-established theory of at least one famous scientist.

I know I am going to be flamed for this, but this very topic is discussed at extreme length in Stephen Wolfram's book, "A New Kind of Science". He specifically goes on end about a particular one-dimensional cellular automata, "rule 110" (IIRC), which seems to produce randomness, but which is based off of a small handful of simple rules, and a base starting condition of a single black pixel. He demonstrates in excruciating detail how, no matter how complicated you make a system, that all such systems can be brought back to the set of simple one-dimensional CAs. He demostrates how Turing machines can be set up (via initial starting conditions - not just a single pixel) which use these same CA to perform Turing machine calculations - thus these same CA can, in theory, execute (albeit very slowly) and emulate any current computer or program in existance today. He names this "the principle of computational equivalence".

He explores at great length how systems that are seemingly random can actually be simulated by these self-same CAs, which are based on simple sets of rules - blowing away the time-held notion that complexity arises from an underlying complex ruleset. It stands to reason that given the ruleset, and a result output from the CA, one can work back to the initial starting conditions - the problem arises in that we may only have the initial conditions, figuring out that ruleset is (probably) impossible.

He explores our current methods of perception and analysis, and shows how while our current methods of analysis show that something is random, as humans using our senses we have an affinity for picking out what look to be like patterns - he seems to make the point (unless I have misinterpreted him - which is very likely) that it isn't our senses decieving us, it is our methods of analysis that are incomplete. He also presents ideas and thoughts on how we can overcome these limitations.

The book is much more than that, however - I have read articles dismissing the work as everything from a form of plagerism (at worse) to restating others thoughts (at best). I do not believe this is the case. While it is true many others in the past have played with CAs, what Wolfram has done is go that extra step, building on these ideas and bringing them all together under one umbrella of thought. He acknowledges this throughout the book.

Anyone interested in these topics and others tangent to them owes it to themselves to read Wolfram's book and come to their own conclusions. I honestly believe he is on to something, which could have profound effects in the future (perhaps far in the future, but much sooner if we read it and understand it now).

Other related links:

Collection of Reviews on ANKOS
Stephen Wolfram's Web Site
ANKOS Web Site

Well Stephen Wolfram is a crack. Have you read his book.

Here's the reference to the Genius Award:

http://www.stephenwolfram.com/about-sw/interviews/ 81-nyt/

Another good article about his latest work: On Forbes

Wolfram's first CA book (the collection of his papers) is out of print but available for download at http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/books/c a-reprint/

I read an article in Forbes a while ago that did a good job of explaining Wolfram to lay-people [business-oriented people, obviously] and also gave some hints at his reputation for arrogance. Stephen also has a list of his recent press coverage.

Wolfram Research is named after its founder, Stephen Wolfram, not for the element Tungsten. See this site. So "Tungsten Graphics" isn't copying anything here.

1) the various quantum tunneling experiments, where the Mozart 40th Symphony was transmitted through solid metal at several times the speed of light. There is a good link here. There was even a NOVA special or something on that (see that transcript here, - info about 2/3rds into the material)

2) maybe something involving the research of Steven Wolfram (developer of Mathematica), as seen in his forth coming book A New Kind of Science, which is very geeky, very bizarre, and right up this alley, and is supposed to be a rethinking of the very fundamentals of how science works. My head hurts already. This book is due for publication in January 2002, and is well worth pre-ordering.

It seems that for the last eight years Wolfram has essentially been running his company by remote control, working all night, every night, on a new kind of science, which is the name of the book he will soon publish to describe it.
Wolfram's new science propounds an extraordinary idea: With a few basic objects and a few rules of behavior--run a few hundred million times--he believes it is not only possible to create structures of great complexity, but the universe itself, including its vast regions of apparent chaos.

While Stephen Wolfram is undoubtedly a very clever man, I seriously doubt whether he is the first or only person to investigate these kinds of concepts.

The Forbes article is about Steven Wolfram, creator of Mathmatica and general genius, whos now been using CA to model all aspects of reality, physics, biology etc, I suggest you check out his homepage I would recommend someone on /. review his upcoming book "A New Kind of Science" when it appears in 2001, should be an interesting read all about his ideas.