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Interviews: Ask Stephen Wolfram a Question
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.
How much RAM is a wolf supposed to have?
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Dr. Algernop Krieger.
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If you want to advance mathematics you must show your working.
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?
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?
..don't panic
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?
Will you please do something with http://www.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.
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.
It seems like we have many smart people warning us about the dangers of AI. What's your opinion on the prospects?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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? ;-)
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.
Wolfram Research is known around town (Champaign-Urbana) as a pretty unpleasant work environment. (See some of the comments here.) 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.....
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?
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 human minds to escape Godelian limits, and, I dare say, senility, is what's really going on here. Quantum mechanics and quantum field theory are computable theories, and adding in thermodynamics gives you even stronger results (Bekenstein bound); virtually everyone but Penrose/Hameroff accepts that any 'final' TOE will be quantum in nature. It's sad to see Penrose giving keynote addresses with the likes of Deepak Chopra (http://www.edgemagazine.net/2014/04/consciousness-conference/), who also was one of the reviewers of Penrose/Hameroff's 2013 paper (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064513001188 scroll down for Chopra). Are you fucking kidding me?
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
The basics ;-).
nosig today
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
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?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.