Wolfram Claims "A New Kind of Science"
Stephen Wolfram is featured in the technology quarterly section of the June 2, 2011 issue of The Economist. He’s an expert at identifying and assembling tiny little specific computer programs. A child prodigy, he obtained a PhD at an early age and developed a special computer program consisting of math programs, Mathematica, which is widely used by engineers, scientists and finance gurus. This program pays for his research firm, Wolfram Research, which explores the many eclectic areas he is personally curious about. The Economist notes that this research firm "already claims to have the largest collection of curated, cross-checked data in the world.:"
After ten years of near-isolation, he produced a book in 2002, New Kind of Science, which speculates that these mini-math-programs are the center of mathematics, biology, astronomy, physics, in fact the entire universe. This approach, which Wolfram hypenates as "NKS," has some severe and respected critics, including such luminaries as Freeman Dyson.
Wolfram has gone on to create a new and useful search engine, "Wolfram Alpha," in 2009. It performs a form of instant statistical research in response to queries.
He is a very eccentric and very opinionated genius – who might be on to something big.
The Economist reports that the Wolfram Tones website "can produce a two-minute tune in any of 15 genres using NKS. ‘What I’ve heard from a surprising number of very upscale, reputable composer types is that this is actually pretty useful,’ says Dr. Wolfram. ‘They go to the website, press the button a few times and get some ideas. Creativity is now free.’"
The ability to compose music has been a long-standing barrier to artificial intelligence. Creating melody is something computers are not supposed to be smart enough to do.
Here are some quotes from Stephen Wolfram:
"There is no dramatic distinction between the processes of the weather and the workings of the human brain."
"There isn’t anything incredibly special about intelligence, it’s just sophisticated computational work that has grown up throughout human history."
"Search engines are like a blender. They put all this stuff into one algorithm and deliver a list of links. That’s great when it works but it isn’t going to work for a lot of the stuff that we care about. Our objective is that pretty much anything you need to go ask a human expert about right now, will be able to be answered automatically." Doing this is, he says, "insanely difficult".
"I found that the best way to do interesting intellectual stuff is to have a company [under his complete control] that’s successful enough to pay for it."
"In Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, there are all kinds of things that we can already compute faster, better and stronger than anybody else, using NKS, a methodology that other people think is completely insane. NKS absolutely gives us a competitive advantage."
-- this summary was prepared by the blog author from this article:
Stephen Wolfram is featured in the technology quarterly section of the June 2, 2011 issue of The Economist. He’s an expert at identifying and assembling tiny little specific computer programs. A child prodigy, he obtained a PhD at an early age and developed a special computer program consisting of math programs, Mathematica, which is widely used by engineers, scientists and finance gurus. This program pays for his research firm, Wolfram Research, which explores the many eclectic areas he is personally curious about. The Economist notes that this research firm "already claims to have the largest collection of curated, cross-checked data in the world.:"
After ten years of near-isolation, he produced a book in 2002, New Kind of Science, which speculates that these mini-math-programs are the center of mathematics, biology, astronomy, physics, in fact the entire universe. This approach, which Wolfram hypenates as "NKS," has some severe and respected critics, including such luminaries as Freeman Dyson.
Wolfram has gone on to create a new and useful search engine, "Wolfram Alpha," in 2009. It performs a form of instant statistical research in response to queries.
He is a very eccentric and very opinionated genius – who might be on to something big.
The Economist reports that the Wolfram Tones website "can produce a two-minute tune in any of 15 genres using NKS. ‘What I’ve heard from a surprising number of very upscale, reputable composer types is that this is actually pretty useful,’ says Dr. Wolfram. ‘They go to the website, press the button a few times and get some ideas. Creativity is now free.’"
The ability to compose music has been a long-standing barrier to artificial intelligence. Creating melody is something computers are not supposed to be smart enough to do.
Here are some quotes from Stephen Wolfram:
"There is no dramatic distinction between the processes of the weather and the workings of the human brain."
"There isn’t anything incredibly special about intelligence, it’s just sophisticated computational work that has grown up throughout human history."
"Search engines are like a blender. They put all this stuff into one algorithm and deliver a list of links. That’s great when it works but it isn’t going to work for a lot of the stuff that we care about. Our objective is that pretty much anything you need to go ask a human expert about right now, will be able to be answered automatically." Doing this is, he says, "insanely difficult".
"I found that the best way to do interesting intellectual stuff is to have a company [under his complete control] that’s successful enough to pay for it."
"In Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, there are all kinds of things that we can already compute faster, better and stronger than anybody else, using NKS, a methodology that other people think is completely insane. NKS absolutely gives us a competitive advantage."
-- this summary was prepared by the blog author from this article:
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