Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

News, Views & Insights

Date Archive: 2014 January

Education & Academic

Computer-Based Math Continues to Gain Momentum

The country of Estonia has been racking up the accolades recently, receiving high praise for its stellar PISA scores, and recognition from the BBC News for its progressive, cutting-edge teaching practices. One of the many reasons for this is that Estonian primary schools have long been teaching students as young as seven and eight years old how to build robots, develop QR codes, and write computer programs. They are the pioneers of a growing movement to finally make computer science once again a core subject in K--12 classrooms. Innovative school districts worldwide, including Chicago Public Schools in the US, have recently begun to follow suit, incorporating computer science into the lesson plans of classes as early as primary school.
Wolfram Blog Team
Education & Academic

How to Win at Rock-Paper-Scissors

Rock-paper-scissors* isn't obviously interesting to look at mathematically. The Nash-equilibrium strategy is very simple: choose equally and randomly from the three choices, and (in the long run) your opponent will not beat you (nor will you beat your opponent). Nevertheless, it's still possible for a computer strategy to beat a human player over a long run of games. My nine-year-old daughter showed me one solution with a Scratch program that she wrote that won every time by looking at your choice before making its decision! But I will walk you through a simple solution that wins without cheating.
Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
Computation & Analysis

The Wolfram Technology Conference Egg-Bot Challenge Winners

We have a programming competition every year at the Wolfram Technology Conference, which in past years was the Mathematica One-Liner Competition (2010, 2011). This year we held the Egg-Bot Challenge, a change of pace to give attendees a chance to exercise their graphics skills. The idea of the competition was to use Mathematica to generate designs that could be plotted on spheres via Egg-Bots, computer-controlled plotters that draw on eggs, Ping-Pong balls, light bulbs, mini-pumpkins, golf balls... nearly anything spherical or ovoid that is less than four inches in diameter.
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Announcements & Events

Read Up on Mathematica in Many Subjects

Researchers and professionals from around the world are frequently using Mathematica to further their fields of study. We like to recognize these published books and papers that incorporate our technologies and catalog them so that you can find resources for using Mathematica in subjects you need. Here are some recent publications:
Wolfram Blog Team
Products

Launching the Wolfram Connected Devices Project

Connected devices are central to our long-term strategy of injecting sophisticated computation and knowledge into everything. With the Wolfram Language we now have a way to describe and compute about things in the world. Connected devices are what we need to measure and interface with those things. In the end, we want every type of […]

Stephen Wolfram
Announcements & Events

Wolfram Year in Review: 2013

Before we dive completely into 2014, we'd like to take a minute to look back on some of the biggest announcements and most interesting stories that we shared on the Wolfram Blog this past year. Below are the top 10 most popular Wolfram Blog posts of 2013, with a few honorable mentions thrown in for good measure. Take a look---there are bound to be a few that you missed.
Wolfram Blog Team