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How Many Animals and Arp-imals Can One Find in a Random 3D Image?

And How Many Animals, Animal Heads, Human Faces, Aliens and Ghosts in Their 2D Projections?

Introduction

In my recent Wolfram Community post, "How many animals can one find in a random image?," I looked into the pareidolia phenomenon from the viewpoints of pixel clusters in random (2D) black-and-white images. Here are some of the shapes I found, extracted, rotated, smoothed and colored from the connected black pixel clusters of a single 800x800 image of randomly chosen, uncorrelated black-and-white pixels.
Michael Trott, Chief Scientist, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Best of Blog

Analyzing and Translating an Alien Language: Arrival, Logograms and the Wolfram Language

If aliens actually visited Earth, world leaders would bring in a scientist to develop a process for understanding their language. So when director Denis Villeneuve began working on the science fiction movie Arrival, he and his team turned to real-life computer scientists Stephen and Christopher Wolfram to bring authentic science to the big screen. Christopher specifically was tasked with analyzing and writing code for a fictional nonlinear visual language. On January 31, he demonstrated the development process he went through in a livecoding event you can watch on YouTube.
Michael Gammon, Blog Administrator, Document & Media Systems
Best of Blog

Exploring a Boxing Legend’s Career with the Wolfram Language: Ali at 75

Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.; January 17, 1942--June 3, 2016) is considered one of the greatest heavyweight boxers in history, with a record of 56 wins and 5 losses. He remains the only three-time lineal heavyweight champion, so there's no doubt why he is nicknamed "The Greatest." I used the Wolfram Language to create several visualizations to celebrate his work and gain some new insights into his life. Last June, I wrote a Wolfram Community post about Ali's career. On what would have been The Greatest's 75th birthday, I wanted to take a minute to explore the larger context of Ali's career, from late-career boxing stats to poetry. First, I created a PieChart showing Ali's record:
Jofre Espigulé-Pons, Machine Learning
Computation & Analysis

Automotive Reliability in the Wolfram Language

This post originally appeared on Wolfram Community, where the conversation about reliable cars continues. Be sure to check out that conversation and more---we can't wait to see what you come up with! For the past couple of years, I've been playing with, collecting and analyzing data from used car auctions in my free time with an automotive journalist named Steve Lang to try and get an idea of what the used car market looks like in terms of long-term vehicle reliability. I figured it was about time that I showed off some of the ways that the Wolfram Language has allowed us to parse through information on over one million vehicles (and counting).
Nick Lariviere, Kernel Developer, Algorithms R&D
Education & Academic

Gardening à la Gardner

When looking through the posts on Wolfram Community, the last thing I expected was to find exciting gardening ideas. The general idea of Ed Pegg's tribute post honoring Martin Gardner, "Extreme Orchards for Gardner," is to find patterns for planting trees in configurations with constraints like "25 trees to get 18 lines, each having 5 trees." Most of the configurations look like ridiculous ideas of how to plant actual trees. For example:
Kathryn Cramer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Education & Academic

The Semantic Representation of Pure Mathematics

Introduction

Building on thirty years of research, development and use throughout the world, Mathematica and the Wolfram Language continue to be both designed for the long term and extremely successful in doing computational mathematics. The nearly 6,000 symbols built into the Wolfram Language as of 2016 allow a huge variety of computational objects to be represented and manipulated---from special functions to graphics to geometric regions. In addition, the Wolfram Knowledgebase and its associated entity framework allow hundreds of concrete "things" (e.g. people, cities, foods and planets) to be expressed, manipulated and computed with. Despite a rapidly and ever-increasing number of domains known to the Wolfram Language, many knowledge domains still await computational representation. In his blog "Computational Knowledge and the Future of Pure Mathematics," Stephen Wolfram presented a grand vision for the representation of abstract mathematics, known variously as the Computable Archive of Mathematics or Mathematics Heritage Project (MHP). The eventual goal of this project is no less than to render all of the approximately 100 million pages of peer-reviewed research mathematics published over the last several centuries into a computer-readable form. In today's blog, we give a glimpse into the future of that vision based on two projects involving the semantic representation of abstract mathematics. By way of further background and motivation for this work, we first briefly discuss an international workshop dedicated to the semantic representation of mathematical knowledge, which took place earlier this year. Next, we present our work on representing the abstract mathematical concepts of function spaces and topological spaces. Finally, we showcase some experimental work on representing the concepts and theorems of general topology in the Wolfram Language.
Eric Weisstein, Senior Researcher, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content Ian Ford, Pure Math Developer, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
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