We are excited to announce that registration is now open for the Wolfram Technology Conference 2012, October 17–19 in Champaign, Illinois! Wolfram is innovating at a breathtaking pace. Hear directly from developers about the latest technologies for mobile devices, cloud computing, interactive deployment, and much more.

For the first time, we're holding a virtual event in a new talk-show format. We'll put Mathematica experts live on camera to answer your questions about visualization. Our host will accept questions in real time and pass them to three of our graphics experts. You can also submit your question when you register for the event. We will be prepared to address questions on graphics and visualizations, similar to these: How can I add a drop shadow to my plot? How can I independently color different sides of a surface? How can I turn several locators on and off on a graphic with a mouse click? How can I make an x-y scatter plot with auxiliary histograms placed next to the x-y axes? How can I create an intertwined graphic like the one below? The virtual event will be held Tuesday, May 22, from 11am to noon Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

(This is the third in a series of posts about A New Kind of Science. Previous posts have covered the original reaction to the book and what's happened since it was published.) Today ten years have passed since A New Kind of Science ("the NKS book") was published. But in many ways the development that started with the book is still only just beginning. And over the next several decades I think its effects will inexorably become ever more obvious and important. Indeed, even at an everyday level I expect that in time there will be all sorts of visible reminders of NKS all around us. Today we are continually exposed to technology and engineering that is directly descended from the development of the mathematical approach to science that began in earnest three centuries ago. Sometime hence I believe a large portion of our technology will instead come from NKS ideas. It will not be created incrementally from components whose behavior we can analyze with traditional mathematics and related methods. Rather it will in effect be "mined" by searching the abstract computational universe of possible simple programs. And even at a visual level this will have obvious consequences. For today's technological systems tend to be full of simple geometrical shapes (like beams and boxes) and simple patterns of behavior that we can readily understand and analyze. But when our technology comes from NKS and from mining the computational universe there will not be such obvious simplicity. Instead, even though the underlying rules will often be quite simple, the overall behavior that we see will often be in a sense irreducibly complex. So as one small indication of what is to come---and as part of celebrating the first decade of A New Kind of Science---starting today, when Wolfram|Alpha is computing, it will no longer display a simple rotating geometric shape, but will instead run a simple program (currently, a 2D cellular automaton) from the computational universe found by searching for a system with the right kind of visually engaging behavior.