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http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2013/11/something-very-big-is-coming-our-most-important-technology-project-yet/

by mh_ • 13 years ago

162 76 13 years ago

blog.stephenwolfram.com

archgrove• 13 years ago

Lots 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.

yannis2• 13 years ago

But 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• 13 years 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.

ArbitraryLimits• 13 years ago

So 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.

cicatriz• 13 years ago

Yep, I don't get why Wolfram language would replace APIs we already have in place.

Because it's in natural language? WolframAlpha demonstrates (unsurprisingly) that it's still finicky. You still have to do just as much work to ensure connected services are working together properly.

Because--according to universal computation--it covers the entire computable world? So does any Turing-complete language.

I do see this as another cool thing along the lines of IPython Notebooks or JS Fiddle where you can quickly hook up to services and share the results. Uniquely, WolframAlpha's datasets and some of Mathematica's features. So it'd be nice for homework sets or Bret Victor-esque reactive documents (see http://worrydream.com/Tangle/).

taliesinb12• 13 years ago

Hmhmhmhm... I'm working with the people who are building these cloud systems, so let me elaborate a little:

No, the Wolfram Language is not natural language. It's the LISP-like language behind Mathematica. We needed to do that from a branding perspective so that the Mathematica product can continue to exist for the academic market without being conflated with the underlying language, which has much wider aspirations.

But as for natural language, you can press '=' and go into 'natural language mode' and write stuff like "total the list", but in my opinion it isn't very good yet and is only really useful for absolute beginners. I think it could get much better in the future when we have nice sophisticated type inference going (which I am working on right now).

As for IPython: the In[..] and Out[..] lines you see in IPython (and amusingly some other cloud system-based IDEs now) mirror v1 of Mathematica back in 1987 (I believe deliberately). It's an amusing accident of syntax that evaluating In[1] works in both Python and Mathematica.

But yes, exactly, part of this whole story is an online IDE (actually, a set of them) that makes it extremely easy to get a whole system deployed. Imagine setting up some machine learning, creating some slick visualizations, allocating some persistent storage, putting it behind an API, and creating an embedded dashboard, all in the space of 20 minutes and a few dozens of lines of code.

The closest existing competitor is FP complete's cloud Haskell system, but I'd love to know about others.

ronaldx• 13 years ago

What Wolfram says is nonsense but what he produces is still good.

Wolfram Alpha was massively over-hyped and billed as a Google-killer. It is not remotely that, but it's still an incredibly useful and inimitable product.

nnethercote• 13 years ago

They gave me a sneak peek at the code... it just implements rule 110! No wonder it's so powerful. </sarcasm>

yannis2• 13 years ago

Sounds 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.

undoware• 13 years ago

I 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...

csmuk2• 13 years ago

And 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.

pertinhower2• 13 years ago

But Alpha is free.

csmuk2• 13 years ago

Some of it is free...

gmisra• 13 years ago

Another 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/wolfra...

bsaul2• 13 years ago

Just read your comment after posting mine. I guess yours answers mine in a way :))))

taliesinb12• 13 years ago

An 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

jacobolus• 13 years 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.]

bsaul2• 13 years ago

Btw did "a new kind of science" had any kind of application so far ?

joeld42• 13 years ago

I 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.

xradionut2• 13 years ago

I 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• 13 years ago

Or "A New Implementation of LISP"...

taliesinb12• 13 years ago

I'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?).

doop5• 13 years ago

I was under the impression that lattice gas methods in CFD were more or less obsolete. They're nice in that they're unconditionally stable and only use bitwise operations, but the amount of CPU time you save from this is massively outweighed by the number of simulation runs you need to do to average out the noise. They're also not Galilean invariant (at least not without messing around with rescaling factors). Lattice Boltzmann is much more practical.

pbsd• 13 years ago

cellular automata-based PRNGs for stream ciphers

This is something that kind of died in the late 80s. One of the most noteworthy cases was Damgard's CA-based hash function in the paper that proved collision-resistance of the Merkle-Damgard mode [1]. It was quickly broken [2]. The SHA-3 winner, Keccak, has roots in CA-based designs [3], but at this point it's little more than an historical footnote.

[1] http://www.inf.usi.ch/faculty/shrimpton/spring09/damgard89.p...

[2] http://www.cosic.esat.kuleuven.be/publications/article-132.p...

[3] http://ice.mat.dtu.dk/slides/KeccakIcebreak-slides.pdf

mathattack3• 13 years ago

Did it struggle to change the world because he lost interest, and focused on other things afterwards?

It seems like he has an awful lot of balls in the air, which might mean long intellectual leaps, but not the legwork behind them.

pertinhower2• 13 years ago

It'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• 13 years ago

Srsly. 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.

ffk2• 13 years ago

If 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• 13 years ago

I 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.

ffk2• 13 years ago

Sorry for the miscommunication, I specifically meant the tools created by his company such as Mathematica and Alpha.

spitfire4• 13 years ago

Bombastic, 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.

mathattack3• 13 years ago

What makes it so much more powerful than any other computing language?

leephillips• 13 years ago

This presentation [0] does a good job of showing what's special about the Mathematica language. I don't use it myself (closed source), but it is undeniably cool, powerful, and different. It turns out that Mathematica’s design has a conceptual elegance that makes it capable of a type of interaction that’s nothing short of astonishing in its flexibility and generality.

[0] http://vimeo.com/44968627

tfb2• 13 years ago

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.

Can you elaborate and/or provide a thorough example of this? I'm curious.

spitfire4• 13 years ago

Sure. 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/QueueingProce... [2] http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Optimization....

zackmorris• 13 years ago

I have to generally agree here, although my experience has mostly been with Wolfram Alpha. I'm continually amazed at how easily it lets me grapple with optimization problems or solving for different variables (when I barely remember how to do them myself).

However, Mathematica has always felt a bit niche to me. I wish it was more of an open source project like Octave, because I think the approach is awesome but too often I feel constrained by Wolfram's way of looking at things. If I could combine Matlab, Go, Python, Mathematica, Excel and (yikes) php for it's hands-on-get-@#!$-done-facility, that would be my ideal language.

whazor• 13 years ago

What 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/

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• 13 years ago

Sounds like the announcement of wolfram|alpha and even if I enjoy using it, it wasn't that big of a revolution ...

jere• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

I am going to post an epic comment. Stay tuned.

yonks• 13 years ago

Reads like a fever dream. A programming system that curates algorithms and data. What could possibly go wrong?

plg• 13 years ago

wow, man. mathematica has jumped the shark

mlangdon• 13 years ago

Too long; didn't hello world.

TheMagicHorsey• 13 years ago

I have a dream! A dream that ....

One time I knocked my head and blurted out all my ideas without any demos too.

simonhughes22• 13 years ago

So they spent 25 years reinventing LISP?

lubujackson• 13 years ago

This is hurting my brain.

chbrown• 13 years ago

I 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• 13 years ago

Pop quiz: How long have they been working on this?

lispm3• 13 years ago

The 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• 13 years ago

Unless 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.

lispm3• 13 years ago

Roman 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• 13 years ago

There 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).

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