12 ms·

A World Run with Code

194 points by dustinupdyke 7y ago

sara17378 7y ago
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_hao 7y ago
Wolfram and his ego at it again. "Stephen Wolfram is extremely smart." -Stephen Wolfram
- sctb 7y ago
  What's really at it again is the “Wolfram and his ego...” comment. If it's so static then we don't need to mention it.
furyofantares 7y ago
As much as I wish Wolfram would dial back the egocentric tone in places, this is overall an excellent read
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  I wish he'd cite sources rather than implying by omission that everything is his idea. There's a reason A New Kind of Science was self-published.
  - fractalf 7y ago
    Bought the book some years ago, but never really got through it. Keeping it handy though in case I need to knock out a burglar. Thing is massive, shipping was half the cost ;)
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - OneWordSoln 7y ago
    And the same reason I returned it to Barnes & Noble within two days.
  - new4thaccount 7y ago
    I borrowed it once from a friend and after reading a few chapters felt that it was mostly a chapter of smoke and mirrors surrounded by something that was already known and could be explained far more succinctly. The Amazon reviews showed that others felt the same. Wolfram is brilliant, but I'd rather read a book from him that showed him solving all sorts of neat problems.
rodrigosetti 7y ago
So he's comparing his eponymous programming language to the arrival of mathematical notation 400 or so years ago, and the advent of written language.
- dreamcompiler 7y ago
  Yep. That kind of thing is pretty much par for the course for Wolfram.
laythea 7y ago
I watch his live CEOing youtube occasionally. Is quite interesting, but at some point I feel like I am stuck in a work meeting, with no real objections (understandably) being posed to Wolframs proposals. I also think the word computation is used a bit too grandiosely by Wolfram. Which is evidenced in the writing here. I do admire Wolfram for even advertising his CEOing meetings though. He goes into the detail to a level you would not necessarily think a CEO would do. Credit where credit is due, he is not shy. Many CEO's would not bother. I mean, technically, everything is a computation, but we accredit actually complex things to that term, not everything. To use it "whilly-nilly" deflates the words impact.
vertline3 7y ago
The idea of small rules leading to large patterns is not something Wolfram invented, but he seems to think he did. I think Conway's game of life predates it, as does Mandelbrot, then there is the Durer pentagon. Maybe there is a something I am missing though?
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  From what I have heard, what you're missing is Wolfram's ego. That's why he magnifies the importance of what he has done.
  - OneWordSoln 7y ago
    I mean, Mathematica is a truly great, great piece of software, but his "New Kind of Science" was both utterly worthless and a fantastic treatise on how a person's grandiose religion of self leads to utter delusion.
    - zach_garwood 7y ago
      I started to read it when I college, and read hundreds of pages into it before I started to realize that there was nothing there. The entire book can be summed up as "complexity arises from multiple iterations on simplicity" and, like, you can teach that to a middle schooler in a day, no need for a thousands of pages-long tome.
    - dreamcompiler 7y ago
      It was not worthless. It made a great doorstop.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    On that note... Is he really claiming to have invented the Church-Turing Thesis years after their deaths?
swah 7y ago
I love some optimistic view of software like I had when I first started into computers.
jwr 7y ago
I find Stephen Wolfram to be a an interesting person. On one hand, he is undeniably exceptional and created an impressive computational system. On the other hand, the "Wolfram language" is really a pretty poor design as far as programming languages go, and would not even be noticed if it wasn't for the giant standard library that gets shipped with it, called Mathematica. I use the "Wolfram language" because I have to, not because I want to. In other words, if I could easily use the Mathematica library from Clojure, I wouldn't give the Wolfram Language a second glance. I can't think of even a single language aspect that would tempt me to use the Wolfram Language [context: I've been a Mathematica user since 1993] over Clojure. I have (much) better data structures, a consistent library for dealing with them, transducers, core.async, good support for parallel computation, pattern matching through core.match, and finally a decent programming interface with a REPL, which I can use from an editor that does paren-matching for me (ever tried to debug a complex Mathematica expression with mismatched parens/brackets/braces?). This is why the man is a contradiction: his thoughts are undeniably interesting, but his focus and anchoring in the "Wolfram Language" is jarring.
- juskrey 7y ago
  I have interacted much with both Mathematica and Clojure, and the only thing I wish Mathematica had is a coder-oriented editor, like, for example, Cursive in Clojure world. It would become a truly powerful thing. On the quirks of Wolfram language - I personally can live with them, it is good enough considering the requirement to keep Mathematica's historical and huge lib compatibility. However current Mathematica's approach to notebook editing is just a horrible PowerPoint-like mutation.. at least for a coder like myself. I'd even love to help making it better if I had a chance to.
- cytzol 7y ago
  > On the other hand, the "Wolfram language" is really a pretty poor design as far as programming languages go, and would not even be noticed if it wasn't for the giant standard library that gets shipped with it, called Mathematica. In the official documentation (as well as his blog posts), the term “Wolfram Language” is used to refer to the combination of the two: both the syntax and the huge standard library, because you almost always encounter one using the other. This seems pretty common to me — I’ve said things like “I used the Ruby language” when I’m also using its built-in modules. I agree with you in saying that the language part of the Language is nothing particularly special, though.
daenz 7y ago
>Right now, most of what the computers in the world do is to execute tasks we basically initiate. But increasingly our world is going to involve computers autonomously interacting with each other, according to computational contracts. Once something happens in the world—some computational fact is established—we’ll quickly see cascades of computational contracts executing. And there’ll be all sorts of complicated intrinsic randomness in the interactions of different computational acts. I don't think it takes a math genius to see how this is a bad idea. In the same way that trading algorithms can get into a feedback loop that crash markets, these "computational contracts" can cause cascading failures that hurt society as a whole. This is why human intelligence is so critical in running society: it has the ability to question whether its "programming" is correct and having the intended effects, and adjust accordingly. Computational contracts have no such introspection, by definition. They resolve because the rules are satisfied, for better or worse. And all of that isn't even considering the attack surface area for malicious actors to target.
- raz32dust 7y ago
  In the same vein, "Human intelligence" led to the 2008 crash. Human's aren't infallible either. My problem with this argument is that there is no logical basis for how exactly human intelligence is different. Computers aren't there yet in most domains, but there is no evidence to say they can't get there. How soon is anybody's guess right now. While AGI might be far off, I can certainly imagine computers running larger and larger sub-worlds. e.g, if all cars were self-driving, I am reasonably sure we can design traffic to be more efficient with all cars coordinating with each other instead of humans trying to do so.
  - yters 7y ago
    Humans don't think kittens are avocados with complete certainty because someone flicked a speck of green paint on the kitten.
    - Viliam1234 7y ago
      Before stating this with complete certainty, I would ask Oliver Sacks first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...
memory_grep 7y ago
> And, yes, there’s only basically one full computational language that exists in the world today—and it’s the one I’ve spent the past three decades building—the Wolfram Language. :/
- OneWordSoln 7y ago
  If he means, from a mathematical point of view, Mathematica's ability to both symbolically and numerically solve advanced mathematical systems of equations, he's not technically wrong, even if his oversized ego oozes out of every word he utters. If, however, he's talking about general computational systems vis a vis creating programs to run on today's microprocessors, he has obviously drunk too much of his own kool-aid.
  - sgillen 7y ago
    > ability to both symbolically and numerically solve advanced mathematical systems of equations. I mean, python, matlab, julia, octave, sage, and maple would all fit that definition I think. I do think Mathematica's CAS is the best in the business but not the only player for sure. I'm sure Steven has something in mind that sets Wolfram Language apart, just not sure what that is.
trollied 7y ago
If anyone is interested, Wolfram does what he calls “Live CEOing”, and streams his sprints on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/WolframResearch https://www.youtube.com/user/WolframResearch
- stblack 7y ago
  These sessions are streamed live on Twitch, too. These sessions are vastly interesting. I think many commenters here should listen-in sometime. The Wolfram Language is hard because mapping knowledge is hard. What many people here call "ego" is one guy, and his talented team, tackling an enormous problem nobody has licked. So far.
cerealbad 7y ago
perhaps wolfram is parodying his main idea in his work output. from a basic origin he's creating monstrous bloat and complexity, as a type of demonstrative self-referential proof. there are people who write code until it works, and people who rewrite until it doesn't. room enough for both.
- marmaduke 7y ago
  Excellent observation. Perhaps it’s a twist on Conway’s Law?
sktrdie 7y ago
To be honest I haven’t understood much of this. Am I also the only one who’s very skeptical of AI? I see no correlation between what we call “biological thinking” and computation. Even though I don’t know much of the theory behind AI, to me it’s similar to saying that since we have lots of simple calculators, we can arrange them together in some specific way and emergent intelligence will arise. Sure yes I mean but you can say that about everything: let’s arrange a bunch of forks together and intelligence might emerge. And actually from a math point of view you could luckily arrange some forks together and have intelligence since intelligence seems to emerge from an arrangement of atoms. I don’t see why computation has to get a go at intelligent, while anything else not. What’s so unique about computation?
- tlb 7y ago
  The last 80 years have had a string of successes for arranging simple calculators in ways that produce impressive results. Google search, world champion chess players, Fortnite are all examples. I don't know of any impressive results with arranging forks. If there were, you could model the fork behavior on computers and probably run it 1000000x faster. It's certainly possible that some other elements than the simple calculators we use today will lead to the big breakthrough in AI. Perhaps quantum computation is needed. But right now, arrangements of simple calculators seem like the most promising.
  - goatlover 7y ago
    > The last 80 years have had a string of successes for arranging simple calculators in ways that produce impressive results. I view that as biological intelligence figuring out all sorts of clever ways to make calculating tools produce impressive results. > Perhaps quantum computation is needed. But why invoke physics if we're comparing biological intelligence to our computing tools? Isn't it enough to note the big differences? And here I'm not talking so much brain function as I am being a living, social animal that has to survive with a vast human culture. This is the difference between looking at computers as as stepping stones to artificial replacements as opposed to enhancing our abilities. The AI stuff captures the imagination, promises fully automated utopias, scares us with apocalyptic scenarios, and is the stuff of lots of SciFi. While the reality is that computers have always been tools aiding human intelligence. For some reason we view these tools as one day being like Pinocchio. The mythos of the movie AI is based on that vision where the robot boy becomes obsessed with a the blue fairy turning him into a real boy so his adoptive biological mother will love him and take him back. But maybe like in the movie, someday the sentient robots will show up and gave our robot boy his wish.
dgfx 7y ago
Think of all the people in prison, justly or unjustly, under our current system where humans have to interpret and carry out our legal code. We may extend these practices into every domain at negligible cost. Why do we desire authority without conscience? I can think of two reasons: one, we do not wish to hold ourselves accountable; two, we desire to see the strong afflict the weak.
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neptvn 7y ago
Wolfram might be a genius, but I personally find his writing and lectures extremely dull. The only thing he seems to write is how everything is "computational", and how we need to embrace his idea that computing is what the whole universe is about. For example in this blog post alone, we can find this following word count: computer - 19x computation* - 96x computational - 63x Make everything computational! computational intelligence - 2x computational contracts - 7x computational universe - 7x computational language - 18x computational thinking - 2x computational fact - 1x computational acts - 1x computational equivalence - 8x computational irreducibility - 6x computational system - 1x computational process - 1x computational work - 1x computational essays - 2x computational law - 1x Throwing all these words around may sound smart but they lose any meaning or relevance that they were supposed to deliver if being overused in such a larger-than-life manner. </rant>
- bitwize 7y ago
  Welcome to Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram is madly in love with his own ideas, even when those ideas are not nearly as original or world-shakingly profound as he seems to think they are. That he is a genius does not mean he is not in a state of arrested development; prodigious genius like his can impede one's development because people around the genius are so in awe of them that they are unwilling to give them the much-needed corrections and reality checks it takes to grow.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    It's very hard to teach someone whose cup is full. Very smart people can rationalize their bad ideas faster than other people can talk them out of them. But that doesn't mean you've actually explained yourself. If you can't explain things to other people, do you really understand it yourself? At this point Wolfram is lost to us. "What the hell are you talking about, Steve?". I was just fantasizing about resurrecting Richard Feynman and having him ask Wolfram this question but it turns out I don't have to: In a letter from Richard Feynman to Stephen Wolfram: > You don’t understand "ordinary people." To you they are "stupid fools" - so you will not tolerate them or treat their foibles with tolerance or patience - but will drive yourself wild (or they will drive you wild) trying to deal with them in an effective way. > Find a way to do your research with as little contact with non-technical people as possible, with one exception, fall madly in love! That is my advice, my friend.
keerthiko 7y ago
I had this thought when I was 13 and first learned the basics of programming "hey dad if everything is determined by physics and chemistry and computers are real good at math can't we analytically deduce the future." I eventually learned this was just the 13 year old's version of "why's the sky blue?" into "but why is Rayleigh scattering a thing?" and there are several limitations to both human understanding of science, and theoretical computation limits -- a computer to have sufficient accuracy to model the world would by definition need to have as much memory as the world, and model itself in it. I moved on from that idea shortly after learning of that. Is Stephen Wolfram just an overgrown child? Maybe unironically that's what being a genius is about.
- as300 7y ago
  > a computer to have sufficient accuracy to model the world would by definition need to have as much memory as the world, and model itself in it. But what if we had certain "compression" abilities that allowed us to simplify the world? Similar to how storing an audio codec lets us massively minimize how much storage we need for music?
  - neuronexmachina 7y ago
    Or use lossy compression and get quantization noise. The model would probably get pretty weird if you looked at a fine enough detail. ;)
  - keerthiko 7y ago
    Magical compression algorithms that have amazing compression ratios and amazingly computational cost to reasonably decompress to process the data could theoretically raise the upper bound of a computational world. But compression cannot solve for an unbounded recursion problem in the simulator having to model itself it's model of the world, unless we arrived at an analytical closed-form solution for any prediction rather than relying on any modeling.
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  He did pay nice respects to Solomon Golomb (whose death anniversary was two days ago) so I’ll give him that. https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/05/solomon-golomb-19322016/ https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/05/solomon-golomb-19322...
new4thaccount 7y ago
Did he claim to invent computational irreducibility? Wasn't that Goedel or Turing or someone like that?
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  He claims it often. Yes, it was Turing, mostly based on previous work. The worst part is that he misses the detail it being possible to describe all of Math as computation (so they are perfectly equivalent) and creates entire books with keen observations of how much of Math one can describe as computers.
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placebo 7y ago
Not directly related to the article, but going through the comments, I felt the vibes and wanted to express my theory about what it is that irritates many of the commenters here The highest pursuit is the search for truth. This includes the challenging act of discarding things that we'd really like to be true, but are false. The success of science can be attributed to extreme selfless intellectual honesty. The more ego gets in the way, the more the truth is compromised. Intelligence can be used in service of finding truth or in feeding our delusions. My view on the distinctions made here between genius and madness are that they correspond to the degree in which intelligence serves truth or delusions. Therefore I'd expect the most outstanding scientists in history were also very humble (perhaps someone with better knowledge on the personality of great scientists can shed more light on this). And to keep things consistent - I might be wrong and thus welcome challenges to this theory :)
- vbuwivbiu 7y ago
  While I definitely agree with you that this is the general pattern in life, the thing is that people aren't always either humble or arrogant, and it is possible to see the truth while being arrogant too. Even Wolfram must have days, or hours, maybe minutes - let's say seconds - when he's humble. And sometimes he also sees the truth while being arrogant. Therefor it's a form of arrogance to dismiss (generally) arrogant people as always wrong. We have to be selective or we might miss something important they've seen. Wolfram is a combination of irritating ego and inspiration.
  - placebo 7y ago
    You are absolutely correct and I even deleted an entire section in my original post how things are never just black or white but it got too long. Thanks for bringing it up.
- regularfry 7y ago
  Newton was notoriously not humble. He's not the only one.
  - 7y ago

194 points by dustinupdyke 7y ago

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_hao 7y ago

Wolfram and his ego at it again. "Stephen Wolfram is extremely smart." -Stephen Wolfram

sctb 7y ago
What's really at it again is the “Wolfram and his ego...” comment. If it's so static then we don't need to mention it.

furyofantares 7y ago

As much as I wish Wolfram would dial back the egocentric tone in places, this is overall an excellent read

TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
I wish he'd cite sources rather than implying by omission that everything is his idea. There's a reason A New Kind of Science was self-published.
- fractalf 7y ago
  Bought the book some years ago, but never really got through it. Keeping it handy though in case I need to knock out a burglar. Thing is massive, shipping was half the cost ;)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- OneWordSoln 7y ago
  And the same reason I returned it to Barnes & Noble within two days.
- new4thaccount 7y ago
  I borrowed it once from a friend and after reading a few chapters felt that it was mostly a chapter of smoke and mirrors surrounded by something that was already known and could be explained far more succinctly. The Amazon reviews showed that others felt the same. Wolfram is brilliant, but I'd rather read a book from him that showed him solving all sorts of neat problems.

rodrigosetti 7y ago

So he's comparing his eponymous programming language to the arrival of mathematical notation 400 or so years ago, and the advent of written language.

dreamcompiler 7y ago
Yep. That kind of thing is pretty much par for the course for Wolfram.

laythea 7y ago

I watch his live CEOing youtube occasionally. Is quite interesting, but at some point I feel like I am stuck in a work meeting, with no real objections (understandably) being posed to Wolframs proposals. I also think the word computation is used a bit too grandiosely by Wolfram. Which is evidenced in the writing here. I do admire Wolfram for even advertising his CEOing meetings though. He goes into the detail to a level you would not necessarily think a CEO would do. Credit where credit is due, he is not shy. Many CEO's would not bother. I mean, technically, everything is a computation, but we accredit actually complex things to that term, not everything. To use it "whilly-nilly" deflates the words impact.

vertline3 7y ago

The idea of small rules leading to large patterns is not something Wolfram invented, but he seems to think he did. I think Conway's game of life predates it, as does Mandelbrot, then there is the Durer pentagon. Maybe there is a something I am missing though?

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
From what I have heard, what you're missing is Wolfram's ego. That's why he magnifies the importance of what he has done.
- OneWordSoln 7y ago
  I mean, Mathematica is a truly great, great piece of software, but his "New Kind of Science" was both utterly worthless and a fantastic treatise on how a person's grandiose religion of self leads to utter delusion.
  - zach_garwood 7y ago
    I started to read it when I college, and read hundreds of pages into it before I started to realize that there was nothing there. The entire book can be summed up as "complexity arises from multiple iterations on simplicity" and, like, you can teach that to a middle schooler in a day, no need for a thousands of pages-long tome.
  - dreamcompiler 7y ago
    It was not worthless. It made a great doorstop.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  On that note... Is he really claiming to have invented the Church-Turing Thesis years after their deaths?

swah 7y ago

I love some optimistic view of software like I had when I first started into computers.

jwr 7y ago

I find Stephen Wolfram to be a an interesting person. On one hand, he is undeniably exceptional and created an impressive computational system. On the other hand, the "Wolfram language" is really a pretty poor design as far as programming languages go, and would not even be noticed if it wasn't for the giant standard library that gets shipped with it, called Mathematica. I use the "Wolfram language" because I have to, not because I want to. In other words, if I could easily use the Mathematica library from Clojure, I wouldn't give the Wolfram Language a second glance. I can't think of even a single language aspect that would tempt me to use the Wolfram Language [context: I've been a Mathematica user since 1993] over Clojure. I have (much) better data structures, a consistent library for dealing with them, transducers, core.async, good support for parallel computation, pattern matching through core.match, and finally a decent programming interface with a REPL, which I can use from an editor that does paren-matching for me (ever tried to debug a complex Mathematica expression with mismatched parens/brackets/braces?). This is why the man is a contradiction: his thoughts are undeniably interesting, but his focus and anchoring in the "Wolfram Language" is jarring.

juskrey 7y ago
I have interacted much with both Mathematica and Clojure, and the only thing I wish Mathematica had is a coder-oriented editor, like, for example, Cursive in Clojure world. It would become a truly powerful thing. On the quirks of Wolfram language - I personally can live with them, it is good enough considering the requirement to keep Mathematica's historical and huge lib compatibility. However current Mathematica's approach to notebook editing is just a horrible PowerPoint-like mutation.. at least for a coder like myself. I'd even love to help making it better if I had a chance to.
cytzol 7y ago
> On the other hand, the "Wolfram language" is really a pretty poor design as far as programming languages go, and would not even be noticed if it wasn't for the giant standard library that gets shipped with it, called Mathematica. In the official documentation (as well as his blog posts), the term “Wolfram Language” is used to refer to the combination of the two: both the syntax and the huge standard library, because you almost always encounter one using the other. This seems pretty common to me — I’ve said things like “I used the Ruby language” when I’m also using its built-in modules. I agree with you in saying that the language part of the Language is nothing particularly special, though.

daenz 7y ago

>Right now, most of what the computers in the world do is to execute tasks we basically initiate. But increasingly our world is going to involve computers autonomously interacting with each other, according to computational contracts. Once something happens in the world—some computational fact is established—we’ll quickly see cascades of computational contracts executing. And there’ll be all sorts of complicated intrinsic randomness in the interactions of different computational acts. I don't think it takes a math genius to see how this is a bad idea. In the same way that trading algorithms can get into a feedback loop that crash markets, these "computational contracts" can cause cascading failures that hurt society as a whole. This is why human intelligence is so critical in running society: it has the ability to question whether its "programming" is correct and having the intended effects, and adjust accordingly. Computational contracts have no such introspection, by definition. They resolve because the rules are satisfied, for better or worse. And all of that isn't even considering the attack surface area for malicious actors to target.

raz32dust 7y ago
In the same vein, "Human intelligence" led to the 2008 crash. Human's aren't infallible either. My problem with this argument is that there is no logical basis for how exactly human intelligence is different. Computers aren't there yet in most domains, but there is no evidence to say they can't get there. How soon is anybody's guess right now. While AGI might be far off, I can certainly imagine computers running larger and larger sub-worlds. e.g, if all cars were self-driving, I am reasonably sure we can design traffic to be more efficient with all cars coordinating with each other instead of humans trying to do so.
- yters 7y ago
  Humans don't think kittens are avocados with complete certainty because someone flicked a speck of green paint on the kitten.
  - Viliam1234 7y ago
    Before stating this with complete certainty, I would ask Oliver Sacks first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...

memory_grep 7y ago

> And, yes, there’s only basically one full computational language that exists in the world today—and it’s the one I’ve spent the past three decades building—the Wolfram Language. :/

OneWordSoln 7y ago
If he means, from a mathematical point of view, Mathematica's ability to both symbolically and numerically solve advanced mathematical systems of equations, he's not technically wrong, even if his oversized ego oozes out of every word he utters. If, however, he's talking about general computational systems vis a vis creating programs to run on today's microprocessors, he has obviously drunk too much of his own kool-aid.
- sgillen 7y ago
  > ability to both symbolically and numerically solve advanced mathematical systems of equations. I mean, python, matlab, julia, octave, sage, and maple would all fit that definition I think. I do think Mathematica's CAS is the best in the business but not the only player for sure. I'm sure Steven has something in mind that sets Wolfram Language apart, just not sure what that is.

trollied 7y ago

If anyone is interested, Wolfram does what he calls “Live CEOing”, and streams his sprints on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/WolframResearch https://www.youtube.com/user/WolframResearch

stblack 7y ago
These sessions are streamed live on Twitch, too. These sessions are vastly interesting. I think many commenters here should listen-in sometime. The Wolfram Language is hard because mapping knowledge is hard. What many people here call "ego" is one guy, and his talented team, tackling an enormous problem nobody has licked. So far.

cerealbad 7y ago

perhaps wolfram is parodying his main idea in his work output. from a basic origin he's creating monstrous bloat and complexity, as a type of demonstrative self-referential proof. there are people who write code until it works, and people who rewrite until it doesn't. room enough for both.

marmaduke 7y ago
Excellent observation. Perhaps it’s a twist on Conway’s Law?

sktrdie 7y ago

To be honest I haven’t understood much of this. Am I also the only one who’s very skeptical of AI? I see no correlation between what we call “biological thinking” and computation. Even though I don’t know much of the theory behind AI, to me it’s similar to saying that since we have lots of simple calculators, we can arrange them together in some specific way and emergent intelligence will arise. Sure yes I mean but you can say that about everything: let’s arrange a bunch of forks together and intelligence might emerge. And actually from a math point of view you could luckily arrange some forks together and have intelligence since intelligence seems to emerge from an arrangement of atoms. I don’t see why computation has to get a go at intelligent, while anything else not. What’s so unique about computation?

tlb 7y ago
The last 80 years have had a string of successes for arranging simple calculators in ways that produce impressive results. Google search, world champion chess players, Fortnite are all examples. I don't know of any impressive results with arranging forks. If there were, you could model the fork behavior on computers and probably run it 1000000x faster. It's certainly possible that some other elements than the simple calculators we use today will lead to the big breakthrough in AI. Perhaps quantum computation is needed. But right now, arrangements of simple calculators seem like the most promising.
- goatlover 7y ago
  > The last 80 years have had a string of successes for arranging simple calculators in ways that produce impressive results. I view that as biological intelligence figuring out all sorts of clever ways to make calculating tools produce impressive results. > Perhaps quantum computation is needed. But why invoke physics if we're comparing biological intelligence to our computing tools? Isn't it enough to note the big differences? And here I'm not talking so much brain function as I am being a living, social animal that has to survive with a vast human culture. This is the difference between looking at computers as as stepping stones to artificial replacements as opposed to enhancing our abilities. The AI stuff captures the imagination, promises fully automated utopias, scares us with apocalyptic scenarios, and is the stuff of lots of SciFi. While the reality is that computers have always been tools aiding human intelligence. For some reason we view these tools as one day being like Pinocchio. The mythos of the movie AI is based on that vision where the robot boy becomes obsessed with a the blue fairy turning him into a real boy so his adoptive biological mother will love him and take him back. But maybe like in the movie, someday the sentient robots will show up and gave our robot boy his wish.

dgfx 7y ago

Think of all the people in prison, justly or unjustly, under our current system where humans have to interpret and carry out our legal code. We may extend these practices into every domain at negligible cost. Why do we desire authority without conscience? I can think of two reasons: one, we do not wish to hold ourselves accountable; two, we desire to see the strong afflict the weak.

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neptvn 7y ago

Wolfram might be a genius, but I personally find his writing and lectures extremely dull. The only thing he seems to write is how everything is "computational", and how we need to embrace his idea that computing is what the whole universe is about. For example in this blog post alone, we can find this following word count: computer - 19x computation* - 96x computational - 63x Make everything computational! computational intelligence - 2x computational contracts - 7x computational universe - 7x computational language - 18x computational thinking - 2x computational fact - 1x computational acts - 1x computational equivalence - 8x computational irreducibility - 6x computational system - 1x computational process - 1x computational work - 1x computational essays - 2x computational law - 1x Throwing all these words around may sound smart but they lose any meaning or relevance that they were supposed to deliver if being overused in such a larger-than-life manner. </rant>

bitwize 7y ago
Welcome to Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram is madly in love with his own ideas, even when those ideas are not nearly as original or world-shakingly profound as he seems to think they are. That he is a genius does not mean he is not in a state of arrested development; prodigious genius like his can impede one's development because people around the genius are so in awe of them that they are unwilling to give them the much-needed corrections and reality checks it takes to grow.
- hinkley 7y ago
  It's very hard to teach someone whose cup is full. Very smart people can rationalize their bad ideas faster than other people can talk them out of them. But that doesn't mean you've actually explained yourself. If you can't explain things to other people, do you really understand it yourself? At this point Wolfram is lost to us. "What the hell are you talking about, Steve?". I was just fantasizing about resurrecting Richard Feynman and having him ask Wolfram this question but it turns out I don't have to: In a letter from Richard Feynman to Stephen Wolfram: > You don’t understand "ordinary people." To you they are "stupid fools" - so you will not tolerate them or treat their foibles with tolerance or patience - but will drive yourself wild (or they will drive you wild) trying to deal with them in an effective way. > Find a way to do your research with as little contact with non-technical people as possible, with one exception, fall madly in love! That is my advice, my friend.

keerthiko 7y ago

I had this thought when I was 13 and first learned the basics of programming "hey dad if everything is determined by physics and chemistry and computers are real good at math can't we analytically deduce the future." I eventually learned this was just the 13 year old's version of "why's the sky blue?" into "but why is Rayleigh scattering a thing?" and there are several limitations to both human understanding of science, and theoretical computation limits -- a computer to have sufficient accuracy to model the world would by definition need to have as much memory as the world, and model itself in it. I moved on from that idea shortly after learning of that. Is Stephen Wolfram just an overgrown child? Maybe unironically that's what being a genius is about.

as300 7y ago
> a computer to have sufficient accuracy to model the world would by definition need to have as much memory as the world, and model itself in it. But what if we had certain "compression" abilities that allowed us to simplify the world? Similar to how storing an audio codec lets us massively minimize how much storage we need for music?
- neuronexmachina 7y ago
  Or use lossy compression and get quantization noise. The model would probably get pretty weird if you looked at a fine enough detail. ;)
- keerthiko 7y ago
  Magical compression algorithms that have amazing compression ratios and amazingly computational cost to reasonably decompress to process the data could theoretically raise the upper bound of a computational world. But compression cannot solve for an unbounded recursion problem in the simulator having to model itself it's model of the world, unless we arrived at an analytical closed-form solution for any prediction rather than relying on any modeling.
selimthegrim 7y ago
He did pay nice respects to Solomon Golomb (whose death anniversary was two days ago) so I’ll give him that. https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/05/solomon-golomb-19322016/ https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/05/solomon-golomb-19322...

new4thaccount 7y ago

Did he claim to invent computational irreducibility? Wasn't that Goedel or Turing or someone like that?

marcosdumay 7y ago
He claims it often. Yes, it was Turing, mostly based on previous work. The worst part is that he misses the detail it being possible to describe all of Math as computation (so they are perfectly equivalent) and creates entire books with keen observations of how much of Math one can describe as computers.

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placebo 7y ago

Not directly related to the article, but going through the comments, I felt the vibes and wanted to express my theory about what it is that irritates many of the commenters here The highest pursuit is the search for truth. This includes the challenging act of discarding things that we'd really like to be true, but are false. The success of science can be attributed to extreme selfless intellectual honesty. The more ego gets in the way, the more the truth is compromised. Intelligence can be used in service of finding truth or in feeding our delusions. My view on the distinctions made here between genius and madness are that they correspond to the degree in which intelligence serves truth or delusions. Therefore I'd expect the most outstanding scientists in history were also very humble (perhaps someone with better knowledge on the personality of great scientists can shed more light on this). And to keep things consistent - I might be wrong and thus welcome challenges to this theory :)

vbuwivbiu 7y ago
While I definitely agree with you that this is the general pattern in life, the thing is that people aren't always either humble or arrogant, and it is possible to see the truth while being arrogant too. Even Wolfram must have days, or hours, maybe minutes - let's say seconds - when he's humble. And sometimes he also sees the truth while being arrogant. Therefor it's a form of arrogance to dismiss (generally) arrogant people as always wrong. We have to be selective or we might miss something important they've seen. Wolfram is a combination of irritating ego and inspiration.
- placebo 7y ago
  You are absolutely correct and I even deleted an entire section in my original post how things are never just black or white but it got too long. Thanks for bringing it up.
regularfry 7y ago
Newton was notoriously not humble. He's not the only one.
- 7y ago