stephenwolfram
Latest
Dissecting the alien language in 'Arrival'
One of the coolest bits from Arrival isn't the sci-fi movie's Lovecraftian aliens or its stunning cinematography (although, to be fair, those are both great), it's the Heptapods' language. Figuring out a way to communicate with beings without provoking a war is central to the first-contact story's plot. While their spoken language is basically a series of low-frequency grunts and groans, the inky "written" version of it resembles an ouroboros that's written and read from left to right and right to left, simultaneously.
Raspberry Pi becomes a math teacher through new Wolfram bundle
Raspberry Pi computers have already proven to be valuable educational tools, but they're largely blank slates until teachers (and curious owners) find the right software. As of today, that software search just got a lot easier. The company has reached a deal to bundle Wolfram Research's Mathematica app and its companion Wolfram Language with each copy of Raspbian Linux; every Raspberry Pi owner now has free tools for everything from learning math to sophisticated programming. The deal also brings a Remote Development Kit that lets tinkerers connect the Raspberry Pi to Mathematica on a regular PC. While the updated Raspbian download isn't yet ready, all existing users can run a command to install Wolfram's suite. Only some owners will need the bundle, but it could go a long way toward promoting math to a younger generation.
Wolfram working on a 'symbolic' programing language, will be its 'most important' project yet
What Wolfram has accomplished with Alpha is nothing short of stunning. Sure, it can't help you find videos of cats dressed as sharks riding Roombas, but the company's goals were always much loftier. Using the technological foundation it built with Alpha and Mathematica, it's now working on bring its natural language, knowledge-based computational prowess to programming languages. Many of the details are still quite vague but, according to founder Stephen Wolfram, it will be a general purpose programming language, like C++, except it will be largely self contained. That means no (or at least less) pointing to external libraries to accomplish complex tasks. Those other languages focus mostly on structure and leave the difficult task of graphing or processing images to extensions, while Wolfram Language will have at its heart a "giant web of algorithms" to perform many operations. As you'd expect, it integrates quite tightly with Wolfram Alpha, so stock prices, tide times or images of adorable pit bull puppies are easily pulled up in whatever app you're building. Perhaps most importantly, though, because it uses the natural language approach pioneered with Alpha, even the least tech savvy among you should be able to start programming in no time. While we'll clearly have to reserve final judgement for when Wolfram language is available to the public, it sounds like an ideal tool for a child to learn programming on. With its forgiving syntax and deep database, students could quickly and easily whip up simple, but surprisingly functional programs while still leaning the necessary procedure and structure for more advanced languages like Python or Dart. If you're itching for more details, hit up the source for Stephen Wolfram very, very long post on its development.
Stephen Wolfram reveals the personal analytics of his life
Stephen Wolfram may now be best known as the creator of Wolfram Alpha, but he's been involved with data in one way or another for decades, and it turns out he's been collecting plenty of data about himself all that time. Now, he's taken things one step further and made some of that data public, offering a detailed analysis on his blog of his daily email and phone use, and even things like steps, keystrokes, and the occurrence of years in the 230,000 odd pages of documents he's scanned. What's perhaps most interesting, though, is that Wolfram only sees this as the beginning of personal analytics. He eventually hopes to be able to ask Wolfram Alpha all sorts of things about his life, with it not only able to "act as an adjunct to my personal memory," he says, "but also to be able to do automatic computational history -- explaining how and why things happened -- and then making projections and predictions." Interested in doing the same thing yourself one day? Better start hanging onto all that data.
