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Our Most Important Technology Project Yet
- undoware 13y agoI can't wait -- this is going to change my life as profoundly as Wolfram Alpha. How¸ you ask? Well, I'll just Alpha that for you...
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- csmuk 13y agoAnd it's only going to be £3000 a seat!!! Excuse the sarcasm but Mathematica is unjustifiably expensive to be general purpose and ubiquitous and I'm sure any derivative or superior tool will be as well.
- pertinhower 13y agoBut Alpha is free.
- archgrove 13y agoLots of froth, lots of buzz, lots of hype. Few facts, few examples. It's actually hard to comment on, as there's so little to get hold of. Standard Wolfram fare, rally (still waiting for CAs to take over the world), but always disappointing from someone evidently so smart. Oh, and if Mathematica is the basis of the "Wolfram language", and this is the universal computing language of our new "interconnected brain", I'm leaving for another universe. Unless the boy who cried wolf really has cornered one this time.
- yannis 13y agoBut I do grant him the enthusiasm of the forever hacker. I read the article and it came through as someone that had a breakthrough and just wants to talk about it.
- unclebucknasty 13y ago>it came through as someone that had a breakthrough and just wants to talk about it. Yeah, it did. It also reminded me of one of my own "Moments of Absolute Clarity" that tend to unravel considerably when met with the hard test of execution in the real world. There's something about the vagueness of the promise that makes it so reminiscent. Sometimes you can get the sense of being on the verge of something big--but the gnarly difficulty lies in bringing it down from the abstraction.
- taliesinb 13y agoYes, I think it is a lot like simulated annealing, with rounds of the following: 0. internal stresses exist = mutter "look at all these contradictions and warts"; start rethinking assumptions 1. raise temperature = get creative and start brainstorming; new possibilities and combinations present themselves 2. decrease in free energy = do a bunch of prototyping; some radical simplifications or changes of perspective present themselves 3. lower temperature = realize some details are still messy, some ideas were bad; get more conservative and start weeding out stuff 4. repeat until you have to ship
- charlieflowers 13y ago> "Moments of Absolute Clarity" that tend to unravel considerably when met with the hard test of execution in the real world Damn I hate it when that happens! (Especially if I've published the "moment of clarity") :)
- ArbitraryLimits 13y agoSo does your stoned roommate who just finished making whirlpools in a half-full bottle. That's about as much of a filter as Wolfram seems to apply to his own ideas these days.
- yannis 13y agoSounds very promising, Wolfram seems to be on the right track here, pricing might be an issue but I am looking forward to the "language" like the instant cloud deployment.
- gmisra 13y agoAnother good opportunity to re-post this critique of "A New Kind of Science" by Cosma Shalizi. It's not kind. http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfra...
- bsaul 13y agoJust read your comment after posting mine. I guess yours answers mine in a way :))))
- taliesinb 13y agoAn entertaining read, but as an enthusiast of NKS-style science (and ohmygod bias! someone at Wolfram Research) I don't think the review is all that intellectually substantive: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3974503 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3974503
- jacobolus 13y ago“I happen to think that most of it is written in simple, straightforward, unpretentious language” Hahahaha. That’s the funniest thing I’ve read someone write about Wolfram. The comparison to Darwin is also pretty amusing. Darwin’s book is amazing because it spends most of its effort showing us evidence, so we can draw our own conclusions guided by an overwhelming pile of careful data and research, plus a bit of sharp analysis. By contrast, Wolfram’s book spends most of its effort telling us how important it (and he) is, on unremarkable and tediously repetitive evidence/analysis. edit: note the Oxford American Dictionary’s definition of pretentious: “attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed”. For example count the number of things named “Wolfram” in this most recent blog post, or count the hyperbolic adjectives and adverbs: “amazing”, “whole different level”, “profoundly important”, “incredibly useful”, “breathtaking”, “exciting”, “spectacular”, “sophisticated”, “universally accessible”, “new kind of language”, “cover[ing] all forms of computation”, “by far the largest ever”, “immense”, “spectacularly productive”, “remarkable”, “immense”, “completely general and uniform”, “immense”, can’t-do-it-justice, “immediately meaningful”, “absolutely practical, and spectacular”, “amazing”, “never imagined before”, “incredibly fertile”, “disorienting”, uniquely converging, “universal”, incredibly powerful, “instant”, “absurdly”, “seamless”, “dauntingly long”, “widely accessible”, “wonderful”, “exciting”, “with full semantic fidelity”, “instantly programmable”, “a kind of global brain”, “convenient”, “efficient”, “a new level of computation”, “our most important technology project yet”, “incredibly exciting”. If you took out all the adjectives, and all the instances of “Wolfram”, there’d be pretty much nothing left. ;) [NKS is thankfully not quite this bad on a sentence-by-sentence level. But then it has 1000 pages to repeatedly tell us how revolutionary and brilliant it is.]
- bsaul 13y agoBtw did "a new kind of science" had any kind of application so far ?
- joeld42 13y agoI don't know, and it certainly feels kind of silly reading the prologue where it promises to reinvent everything, but I found that book to be fascinating and thought provoking. It didn't change the world but a lot of people are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, there's a lot of good stuff in there. If he had renamed it "Cellular Automata are fun!" or something less bombastic, it would be an instant classic. Also, I think the key insight is pretty deep -- systems are either trivially simple, or limitlessly complex, once you reach a (very low) level of complexity, you can do pretty much anything.
- xradionut 13y agoI got a surplus stack of them that was scrapped at a bookstore to press flowers... As for his post, it should have been titled: "A New Kind of Programming Language".
- chriswarbo 13y agoOr "A New Implementation of LISP"...
- taliesinb 13y agoI'm a Wolfram science summer school instructor, so I'm in a position to see the kinds of trends there are towards NKS-style methods. It's slow, but definitely there. Some of it is directly inspired, some of it is 'convergent evolution'. Here's a very high-level and eclectic list of themes and specific research directions I can remember off-hand: agent-based modeling in economics and operational research, game theory automata in evolutionary biology, lattice gas methods in fluid dynamics, tessellation-based approaches to solving PDAs, L-systems in architectural design, logic automata for programming array-based computers, cellular automata-based PRNGs for stream ciphers, program search for finding lock-free concurrent algorithms, rBMs as used in deep learning. In fact, I used an exhaustive NKS-style search the other day to find novel data query primitives (i.e. what other functions live in the type-signature space that MapReduce occupies?).
- pertinhower 13y agoIt'll be neat when Wolfram uses their (his?) almighty genius to utterly change the world of computing. It'll also be neat when they implement basic undo/redo functionality in Mathematica.
- avn2109 13y agoSrsly. It is unbelievable that they didn't fix this in Version 9. In many ways MMA is incredibly sophisticated software, but it lacks this most obvious of features.
- ffk 13y agoIf scientists can build computational models and test ideas in a significantly easier way, then this is definitely an important project. Wolfram has a large following in the academic world and improvements to his product line can turn into real results.
- gh02t 13y agoI wouldn't say Wolfram himself has a large following in the sciences. At least in my area (math and engineering) he is actually widely and heavily criticized. However, some of the things his company makes are widely used. Mathematica is a genuinely wonderful tool (if you have deep pockets) and Alpha is also very popular.
- ffk 13y agoSorry for the miscommunication, I specifically meant the tools created by his company such as Mathematica and Alpha.
- spitfire 13y agoBombastic, long winded and narcissistic. On target for Stephen Wolfram. But, if you've used mathematica it is the closest thing we have right now to the star trek computer. In a single line I can get solutions to complex problems that would take days in Ruby, Lisp or Haskell. It is the same distance again as Lisp is from C. In fact, many of the failures you see write-ups on HN I've been able to model and solve in a few minutes with MMA. In particular the rap genius Heroku queue issue.
- tfb 13y agoIn a single line I can get solutions to complex problems that would take days in Ruby, Lisp or Haskell. It is the same distance again as Lisp is from C. In fact, many of the failures you see write-ups on HN I've been able to model and solve in a few minutes with MMA. In particular the rap genius Heroku queue issue. Can you elaborate and/or provide a thorough example of this? I'm curious.
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- spitfire 13y agoSure. During the rap genius debacle there were a bunch of people taking time to figure out what was wrong with Heroku's routing. I was entertained because there were two parts to the problem A) queueing and B) optimizations. So with a line of code you could represent heroku's queues and determine exactly how many dyne's you needed. Or, you could try different queueing methods and determine how much money you could have been saving. In some sense Mathematica is further down the What vs How line of language power. Even in ruby, Clojure or Haskell you're still left specifying HOW to do optimization, integration, etc. Not what you'd like to optimize, integrate or manipulate. [1] http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/QueueingProcesses.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/QueueingProce... [2] http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Optimization.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Optimization....
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- whazor 13y agoWhat my view is of what he is trying to explain: You can do awesome stuff with their mathematical based tools. There are tools for statistics, conversions between units, calculation with dates & times, and a lot more. Look for yourself at http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/ http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/ Now, they also have the data. Like weather data, about media(movies/music), about languages, about media, about stock and also a lot more. But for developers there is a problem, you can't build apps with their platform. For example you can't really store or receive data, and there are more practical problems. So I think that they already solved the practical problems. Because they are developing software themselves this way. So for making it friendly for developers they only have to build some frontend for it.
- phelmig 13y agoSounds like the announcement of wolfram|alpha and even if I enjoy using it, it wasn't that big of a revolution ...
- jere 13y ago>There are plenty of existing general-purpose computer languages. But their vision is very different—and in a sense much more modest—than the Wolfram Language. Indeed.
- lignuist 13y agoI am going to post an epic comment. Stay tuned.
- yonks 13y agoReads like a fever dream. A programming system that curates algorithms and data. What could possibly go wrong?
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- plg 13y agowow, man. mathematica has jumped the shark
- mlangdon 13y agoToo long; didn't hello world.
- TheMagicHorsey 13y agoI have a dream! A dream that .... One time I knocked my head and blurted out all my ideas without any demos too.
- simonhughes22 13y agoSo they spent 25 years reinventing LISP?
- lubujackson 13y agoThis is hurting my brain.
- chbrown 13y agoI love hearing Wolfram give talks (I went to his Elements intro at the SF Maker's Fair, right after the iPad came out), and his blog posts; I get sucked in, thinking--- this genius, he thinks of everything! Then I try to find the "Redo" button in Mathematica and I reconsider.
- FrankenPC 13y agoPop quiz: How long have they been working on this?
- lispm 13y agoThe main difference of the Mathematica language to Lisp was this: a) the Mathematica language has an extensive user manual, but the specification of the language is missing. b) Mathematica uses term rewriting. Lisp is based on an evaluation model, with procedural macros added.
- mst 13y agoUnless I misunderstand what you mean by 'term rewriting', fexpr based lisps are similar - everything is a rewrite on the program tree, but 'normal' functions evaluate their arguments before doing things with them, and compile time macros (not reader macros) are effectively a first pass over that tree where any symbol not already bound to a macro is treated as the identity function. The kernel language and associated $vau calculus go into this more, and I've experimented with it somewhat myself having ported Manuel's wat-js to perl.
- lispm 13y agoRoman E. Maeder: > Pattern matching and term rewriting is the fundamental operating principle of Mathematica’s evaluator. All other programming constructs are implemented by way of term rewriting.
- thadk 13y agoThere is more happening with R, D3 / Javascript info vis, and the iPython/Notebook stack around data science than Wolfram as a singular corporation can possibly keep up with. In a recent version R was embraced and extended, is this another step with those same sorts of strategies? The value of these Open Source communities go way beyond the core language and arise out of the structure. This will go the way of Linux/BSD (only Microsoft could justify rolling forward alone with its own OS kernel).