WOLFRAM

News, Views & Insights

Wolfram Language

Computation & Analysis

The Ultimate Team Generator with the Wolfram Language

Every summer, I play in a recreational Ultimate Frisbee league—just “Ultimate” to those who play. It’s a fun, relaxed, coed league where I tend to win more friends than games.

The league is organized by volunteers, and one year, my friend and teammate Nate was volunteered to coordinate it. A couple weeks before the start of the season, Nate came to me with some desperation in his voice over making the teams. The league allows each player to request to play with up to eight other players—disparagingly referred to as their “baggage.” And Nate discovered that with over 100 players in a league, each one requesting a different combination of teammates, creating teams that would please everyone seemed to become more complicated by the minute.

Luckily for him, the Wolfram Language has a suite of graph and network tools for things like social media. I recognized that this seemingly overwhelming problem was actually a fairly simple graph problem. I asked Nate for the data, spent an evening working in a notebook and sent him the teams that night.

Bob Sandheinrich, Development Manager, Document & Media Systems
Education & Academic

Building Uniform Polyhedra for Version 12

Since I started working at Wolfram, I’ve been a part of several different projects. For Version 12, my main focus was replicating models of the uniform polyhedra with the Wolfram Language to ensure that the data fulfilled certain criteria to make our models precise, including exact coordinates, consistent face orientation and a closed region in order to create a proper mesh model of each solid.

Working with visual models of polyhedra is one thing, but analyzing them mathematically proved to be much more challenging. Starting with reference models of the polyhedra, I found that the Wolfram Language made mathematical analysis of uniform polyhedra particularly efficient and easy.

But first, what really are polyhedra, and why should we care? With Version 12, we can explore what polyhedra are and how they’ve earned their continued place in our imaginations.

Keren Garcia, Algorithms R&D
Best of Blog

Mathematica 12 Available on the New Raspberry Pi 4

With the recent announcement of the all-new Raspberry Pi 4, we are proud to announce that our latest development, Version 12 of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language, is available for you to use when you get your hands on the Raspberry Pi 4.

Mathematica 12 is a major milestone in our journey that has spanned 30 years, significantly extending the reach of Mathematica and introducing a whole array of new features, including significant expansion of numerical, mathematic and geometric computation, audio and signal processing, text and language processing, machine learning, neural networks and much more. Version 12 gives Mathematica users new levels of power and effectiveness. With thousands of different updates across the system, and 278 new functions in 103 areas, there is so much to explore.

Jacob Wells, Technical Specialist, European Sales
Education & Academic

How I Used Last-Mover Advantage to Make Money: An Exploration of Yahtzee and Coin Flipping

This week, I won some money applying a mathematical strategy to a completely unpredictable gambling game. But before I explain how, I need to give some background on last-mover advantage.

Some time ago, I briefly considered doing some analysis of the dice game Yahtzee. But I was put off by the discovery that several papers (including this one) had already enumerated the entire game state graph to create a strategy for maximizing the expected value of the score (which is 254.59).

However, maximizing the expected value of the score only solves the solo Yahtzee game. In a competitive game, and in many other games, we are not actually trying to maximize our score—we are trying to win, and these are not always the same thing.

Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
Education & Academic

Easter Eggs in Plain Sight, Climate Change Challenges and Knitted Images: Wolfram Community Highlights

Wolfram Community is our favorite, continually growing forum to share and show support for projects using the Wolfram Language, connect with other Mathematica aficionados and find solutions for coding questions. It's also a great platform for sharing computational innovations that can benefit your local community—or beyond. We've collected some of the exciting ways Wolfram Community members have been giving back through Wolfram technology—check them out!

Chapin Langenheim, Editor & Web Project Coordinator, Project Management
Announcements & Events

The Wolfram Function Repository: Launching an Open Platform for Extending the Wolfram Language

We’re on an exciting path these days with the Wolfram Language. Just three weeks ago we launched the Free Wolfram Engine for Developers to help people integrate the Wolfram Language into large-scale software projects. Now, today, we’re launching the Wolfram Function Repository to provide an organized platform for functions that are built to extend the […]

Stephen Wolfram
Best of Blog

How I Built a Virtual Piano with the Wolfram Language and the Unity Game Engine

You know what’s harder than learning the piano? Learning the piano without a piano, and without any knowledge of music theory. For me, acquiring a real piano was out of the question; I had neither the funds nor space in my small college apartment. So naturally, it looked like I would have to build one myself—digitally, of course. And luckily, I had Mathematica, Unity and a few hours to spare. Because working in Unity is incredibly quick and efficient with the Wolfram Language and UnityLink, I’ve created a playable section of piano, and even learned a bit of music theory in the process.

Alec Shedelbower, Kernel Developer, Algorithms R&D
Computation & Analysis

Doing Data Science Better with Wolfram and the Multiparadigm Approach

Just as Wolfram was doing AI before it was cool, so have we been doing data science since before it was mainstream. A prime example is the creation of Wolfram|Alpha—a massive project that involved engineering, modeling, analyzing, visualizing and interfacing with terabytes of data, developing a natural language interface, and deploying results in a sensible way. Wolfram|Alpha itself is a tool for doing data science, and its continued success is largely because of the underlying strategy we used to build it: a multiparadigm approach driven by natural curiosity, exploring all kinds of data, using advanced methods from a range of areas and automating as much as possible.

Any approach to data science can only be as effective as the computational tools driving it; luckily for us, we had the Wolfram Language at our disposal. Leveraging its universal symbolic representation, high-level automation and human readability—as well as its broad range of built-in computation, knowledge and interfaces—streamlined our process to help bring Wolfram|Alpha to fruition. In this post, I’ll discuss some key tenets of the multiparadigm approach, then demonstrate how they combine with the computational intelligence of the Wolfram Language to make the ideal workflow for not only discovering and presenting insights from your data, but also for creating scalable, reusable applications that optimize your data science processes.

Brian Wood, Technical Communications & Outreach Manager
Announcements & Events

Launching Today: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

It happens far too often. I’ll be talking to a software developer, and they’ll be saying how great they think our technology is, and how it helped them so much in school, or in doing R&D. But then I’ll ask them, “So, are you using Wolfram Language and its computational intelligence in your production software […]

Stephen Wolfram
Show More