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Computation & Analysis

Four Minecraft Projects with the Wolfram Language

A couple of weeks ago I shared a package for controlling the Raspberry Pi version of Minecraft from Mathematica (either on the Pi or from another computer). You can control the Minecraft API from lots of languages, but the Wolfram Language is very well aligned to this task—both because the rich, literate, multiparadigm style of the language makes it great for learning coding, and because its high-level data and computation features let you get exciting results very quickly.

Today, I wanted to share four fun Minecraft project ideas that I had, together with simple code for achieving them. There are also some ideas for taking the projects further.
Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
Computation & Analysis

Programming Minecraft on the Raspberry Pi

The standard Raspbian software on the Raspberry Pi comes with a basic implementation of Minecraft and a full implementation of the Wolfram Language. Combining the two provides a fun playground for learning coding. If you are a gamer, you can use the richness of the Wolfram Language to programmatically generate all kinds of interesting structures in the game world, or to add new capabilities to the game. If you are a coder, then you can consider Minecraft just as a fun 3D rendering engine for the output of your code.

Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
Computation & Analysis

The Shape of the Vote: Exploring Congressional Districts with Computation

In the past few decades, the process of redistricting has moved squarely into the computational realm, and with it the political practice of gerrymandering. But how can one solve the problem of equal representation mathematically? And what can be done to test the fairness of districts? In this post I’ll take a deeper dive with the Wolfram Language—using data exploration with Import and Association, built-in knowledge through the Entity framework and various GeoGraphics visualizations to better understand how redistricting works, where issues can arise and how to identify the effects of gerrymandering.

Brian Wood, Technical Communications & Outreach Manager
Education & Academic

Launching the Wolfram Challenges Site

The more one does computational thinking, the better one gets at it. And today we’re launching the Wolfram Challenges site to give everyone a source of bite-sized computational thinking challenges based on the Wolfram Language. Use them to learn. Use them to stay sharp. Use them to prove how great you are. The Challenges typically […]

Stephen Wolfram
Current Events & History

The Wolfram Language Bridges Mathematics and the Arts

Every summer, 200-some artists, mathematicians and technologists gather at the Bridges conference to celebrate connections between mathematics and the arts. It's five exuberant days of sharing, exploring, puzzling, building, playing and discussing diverse artistic domains, from poetry to sculpture. The Wolfram Language is essential to many Bridges attendees' work. It's used to explore ideas, puzzle out technical details, design prototypes and produce output that controls production machines. It's applied to sculpture, graphics, origami, painting, weaving, quilting—even baking. In the many years I've attended the Bridges conferences, I've enjoyed hearing about these diverse applications of the Wolfram Language in the arts. Here is a selection of Bridges artists' work.
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Computation & Analysis

Spikey Bird: Creating a Flappy Bird Mod in the Wolfram Language

An earlier version of this post appeared on Wolfram Community, where the creation of a game interface earned the author a staff pick from the forum moderators. Be sure to head over to Wolfram Community and check out other innovative uses of the Wolfram Language! If you like video games and you're interested in designing them, you should know that the Wolfram Language is great at making dynamic interfaces. I've taken a simple game, reproduced it and modded it with ease. Yes, it's true—interactive games are yet another avenue for creative people to use the versatile Wolfram Language to fulfill their electronic visions. The game I'm using for this demonstration is Flappy Bird, a well-known mobile game with a simple yet captivating interactive element that has helped many people kill a lot of time. The goal of the game is to navigate a series of pipes, where each successful pass adds a point to your score. The challenge is that the character, the bird, is not so easy to control. Gravity is constantly pulling it down. You "flap" to boost yourself upward by repeatedly tapping the screen, but you must accurately time your flaps to navigate the narrow gaps between pipes. So follow along and see what kind of graphical gaming mayhem is possible in just a few short lines of code!
Kevin Daily, Junior UI Developer, User Interfaces
Computation & Analysis

Computational Gastronomy: Using the Wolfram Language to Prepare a Sumptuous Holiday Feast

In recent years there's been a growing interest in the intersection of food and technology. However, many of the new technologies used in the kitchen are cooking tools and devices such as immersion circulators, silicone steam baskets and pressure ovens. Here at Wolfram, our approach has been a bit different, with a focus on providing tools that can query for, organize, visualize and compute data about food, cooking and nutrition. Last Christmas I went home to Tucson, Arizona, to spend time with my family over the holidays. Because I studied the culinary arts and food science, I was quickly enlisted to cook Christmas dinner. There were going to be a lot of us at my parents' house, so I was aware this would be no small task. But I curate food and nutrition data for Wolfram|Alpha, so I knew the Wolfram technology stack had some excellent resources for pulling off this big meal without a hitch.
Micah Lindley, Junior Research Programmer, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Education & Academic

Creating Mathematical Gems in the Wolfram Language

The Wolfram Community group dedicated to visual arts is abound with technically and aesthetically stunning contributions. Many of these posts come from prolific contributor Clayton Shonkwiler, who has racked up over 75 "staff pick" accolades. Recently I got the chance to interview him and learn more about the role of the Wolfram Language in his art and creative process. But first, I asked Wolfram Community's staff lead, Vitaliy Kaurov, what makes Shonkwiler a standout among mathematical artists.
Michael Gammon, Blog Administrator, Document & Media Systems
Best of Blog

How to Win at Risk: Exact Probabilities

The classic board game Risk involves conquering the world by winning battles that are played out using dice. There are lots of places on the web where you can find out the odds of winning a battle given the number of armies that each player has. However, all the ones that I have seen do this by Monte Carlo simulation, and so are innately approximate. The Wolfram Language makes it so easy to work out the exact values that I couldn't resist calculating them once and for all.
Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
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