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The Winners of the 2021 One-Liner Competition

The Wolfram Language is renowned for simplicity and brevity, and nowhere was that more apparent than at the 10th annual One-Liner Competition, held at the Wolfram Virtual Technology Conference. The contest challenges conference attendees to create the best program possible in 128 characters or fewer (the original length limit of a tweet). With prizes awarded for the three best submissions, competition this year was fierce, but the judges, with only minor bloodshed, were able to settle on a slate of awardees.
Paco Jain, Research Programmer, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
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Launching Version 12.3 of Wolfram Language & Mathematica

Look What We Made in Five Months!

It’s hard to believe we’ve been doing this for 35 years, building a taller and taller tower of ideas and technology that allow us to reach ever further. In earlier times we used to release the results of efforts only every few years. But in recent times we’ve started doing incremental (“.1”) releases that deliver our latest R&D achievements—both fully fleshed out, and partly as “coming attractions”—much more frequently.

We released Version 12.2 on December 16, 2020. And today, just five months later, we’re releasing Version 12.3. There are some breakthroughs and major new directions in 12.3. But much of what’s in 12.3 is just about making Wolfram Language and Mathematica better, smoother and more convenient to use. Things are faster. More “But what about ___?” cases are handled. Big frameworks are more completely filled out. And there are lots of new conveniences.

There are also the first pieces of what will become large-scale structures in the future. Early functions—already highly useful in their own right—that will in future releases be pieces of major systemwide frameworks.

Stephen Wolfram
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How Odd Was the Full Moon on Halloween 2020? Once in a Blue Moon and a Lifetime!

Halloween this year had a surprise up its sleeve. In rare celestial serendipity, the night of costume metamorphosis also featured a full moon, which helped to conjure the spooky mood. Because it might have been the first and last full-moon Halloween that some people witnessed in their lifetime (cue ominous music), I think it was significantly underrated. Moreover, it was the day of a blue moon (the second full moon within a month), but that is not a surprise, as any Halloween’s full moon is always a blue moon. The Moon’s color did not change, though, at least for those away from the smoke of volcanos and forest fires that are capable of turning it visibly blue. To appreciate the science and uniqueness of a full moon this Halloween, I built this visualization that tells the whole story in one picture. This is how I did it.

Vitaliy Kaurov, Director of Community Engagement
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The Winners of the 2020 One-Liner Competition

Although this year’s Wolfram Technology Conference was virtual, that didn’t stop us from running the ninth annual One-Liner Competition, where attendees vie to produce the most amazing results they can with 128 or fewer characters of Wolfram Language code. Here are the winners, including an audio game, a hands-free 3D viewer and code that makes up countries.

Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
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Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in the Wolfram Language

A noteworthy achievement of artificial intelligence, since it is driven by artificial neural networks under the label deep learning, is the ability to create artistic works to generate images, text and sounds. At the core of this breakthrough is a basic method to train neural networks that was introduced by Ian Goodfellow in 2014 and was called by Yann LeCun “the most interesting idea in the last 10 years in machine learning”: generative adversarial networks (GANs). A GAN is a way to train a generative network that produces realistic-looking fake samples out of a latent seed, which can be some arbitrary data or random numbers sampled from a simple distribution. Let’s look at how to do so with some of the new capabilities developed for Mathematica Version 12.1.

Jérôme Louradour, Machine Learning
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Learn Linear Algebra in Five Hours Today with the Wolfram Language!

Linear algebra is probably the easiest and the most useful branch of modern mathematics. Indeed, topics such as matrices and linear equations are often taught in middle or high school. On the other hand, concepts and techniques from linear algebra underlie cutting-edge disciplines such as data science and quantum computation. And in the field of numerical analysis, everything is linear algebra!

Today, I am proud to announce a free interactive course, Introduction to Linear Algebra, that will help students all over the world to master this wonderful subject. The course uses the powerful functions for matrix operations in the Wolfram Language and addresses questions such as "How long would it take to solve a system of 500 linear equations?" or "How does data compression work?"

Devendra Kapadia, Manager of Calculus and Algebra, Algorithms R&D
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Two Lines of Code to Bulletproof Encryption: Advancements in Cryptography Development in the Wolfram Language

Cryptography functionality in the Wolfram Language has been growing significantly ever since it was originally released in Version 10.1. In the latest release, we added support for generation and verification of digital signatures for expressions, files and cloud objects; you can encrypt or digitally sign anything—from simple messages to images or code. In order to maintain our users’ security and safety, we base our algorithms on OpenSSL libraries. While OpenSSL normally requires a great deal of experience to use, integration with the Wolfram Language has made it simple.
Dariia Porechna, Cryptography and Blockchain, Wolfram Language Development
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Chemistry Step-by-Step Solutions: Chemical Reactions

If you’re studying chemistry or are in a discipline requiring chemistry prerequisite courses, then you know how expensive the required textbooks can be. To combat this, the chemical education community has developed open educational resources to provide free chemistry textbooks. However, although free textbooks keep cash in your wallet, they don’t include solution guides for all the homework problems.

Luckily, the Step-by-Step Solutions feature of Wolfram|Alpha has got your back! Whether you’re studying remotely or collaborating via video conferencing, Wolfram|Alpha helps you learn and apply the problem-solving frameworks for chemical word problems. The step-by-step solutions provide stepwise solution guides that can be viewed one step at a time or all at once. The guides not only hone efficient problem solving, but also facilitate digging deeper into concepts that might still be murky.
The Wolfram|Alpha Chemistry Team
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