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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
Computation & Analysis

Edit Your NaNoWriMo Novel with the Wolfram Language

If you're like many of us at Wolfram, you probably know that November was National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Maybe you even spent the past few weeks feverishly writing, pounding out that coming-of-age story about a lonely space dragon that you've been talking about for years. Congratulations! Now what? Revisions, of course! And we, the kindly Wolfram Blog Team, are here to get you through your revisions with a little help from the Wolfram Language.
Zach Littrell, Technical Content Writer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group John Moore, Marketing and Technical Content Team Lead, Technical Communications & Strategy Group
Announcements & Events

The 2016 Wolfram One-Liner Competition Winners

Could you fit the code for a fully functional game of Pong into a single tweet? One that gives you more points the more you take your chances in letting the "ball" escape? Philip Maymin did, and took first prize with that submission in the One-Liner Competition held at this year's Wolfram Technology Conference. Participants in the competition submit 128 or fewer tweetable characters of Wolfram Language code to perform the most impressive computation they can dream up. We had a bumper crop of entries this year that showed the surprising power of the Wolfram Language. You might think that after decades of experience creating and developing with the Wolfram Language, we at Wolfram Research would have seen and thought of it all. But every year our conference attendees surprise us. Read on to see the amazing effects you can achieve with a tweet of Wolfram Language code.

Honorable Mention

Amy Friedman: "The Song Titles" (110 characters)

Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Best of Blog

Finding Pokémon GO’s Shortest Tour to Compute ’em All!

There's a Computed Pokémon nearby! Here is a Poké Spikey. This will help you catch ’em all! In this blog post I will share with you several data insights about the viral social media phenomenon that is Pokémon GO. First I will get you familiarized with the original 151 Pokémon that have now invaded our real world, and then I'll show you how to find the shortest tour to visit your nearby gyms.
Bernat Espigulé-Pons, OSW Operations
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