News, Views & Insights
In food science, small changes can have serious consequences. Altering an ingredient’s composition can affect its nutritional value and physical stability, while changing processing conditions can influence how a food behaves and whether it remains safe. The challenge is not simply measuring each effect in isolation but tracing how decisions about composition shape behavior during processing and storage.
It’s time to answer the question on any breakfast-lover’s mind: “How long do I boil an egg?” While it seems so simple—place an egg in boiling water and wait—it would be remiss to say a fully hard-boiled egg is the only way to enjoy a delightful protein boost. We can use the finite element method (FEM) to simulate the conditions of an egg in water and find the ideal temperature and duration for the perfect egg by assessing temperature changes within the egg itself. We can then predict how long it takes to reach various consistencies, such as a runny yolk or a crumbly, fully set yolk.
Over the last few days, I’ve been asked how ChatGPT (particularly allied to Wolfram|Alpha) will affect education, how it relates to “computational literacy for all” and the computer-based mathematics education that my book The Math(s) Fix provides a blueprint for.
Wolfram is involved in Edtech in many other ways too; it will be great seeing how the full range of powerful integrations emerge that can deliver better education.
It’s always amazing when things suddenly “just work”. It happened to us with Wolfram|Alpha back in 2009. It happened with our Physics Project in 2020. And it’s happening now with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
I’ve been tracking neural net technology for a long time (about 43 years, actually). And even having watched developments in the past few years I find the performance of ChatGPT thoroughly remarkable. Finally, and suddenly, here’s a system that can successfully generate text about almost anything—that’s very comparable to what humans might write. It’s impressive, and useful. And, as I’ll discuss elsewhere, I think its success is probably telling us some very fundamental things about the nature of human thinking.
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