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The Prize Is Won; The Simplest Universal Turing Machine Is Proved

“And although it will no doubt be very difficult to prove, it seems likely that this Turing machine will in the end turn out to be universal.” So I wrote on page 709 of A New Kind of Science (NKS). I had searched the computational universe for the simplest possible universal Turing machine. And I […]

Stephen Wolfram
Announcements & Events

Planning the Wolfram Technology Conference

I think last year’s Wolfram Technology Conference went pretty well. Lots of interesting talks, and I even got to wear fangs and a tie in preparation for Halloween. I did have a couple of misgivings. The days started early and went late, and in some instances I thought certain simultaneous talks in parallel tracks should have been separated. A colleague of mine felt similarly. We both voiced our concerns to the SPTB (Scheduling Powers That Be). Bad idea---now we’re dragged in for scheduling this year’s Technology Conference. (Some Midwesterners might say “drug in.” But I’m from somewhere else.) As the conference takes place October 11-13, this means there has to be some serious scheduling work afoot right now.
Daniel Lichtblau, Symbolic Algorithms Developer, Algorithms R&D
Announcements & Events

My Hobby: Hunting for Our Universe

I don’t have much time for hobbies these days, but occasionally I get to indulge a bit. A few days ago I did a videoconference talking about one of my favorite hobbies: hunting for the fundamental laws of physics. Physics was my first field (in fact, I became a card-carrying physicist when I was a […]

Stephen Wolfram
Announcements & Events

And Now for Our Featured Presentation…

It’s been a few weeks since we returned from San Diego, after participating in SIGGRAPH 2007---one of the most prestigious conferences around for the computer graphics crowd. It’s no surprise how popular we’ve become there, considering that so many computer scientists, professional artists and enthusiasts use Mathematica to generate some of their most fascinating graphics. We were a big hit at the 2006 conference, with the then-upcoming Mathematica 6 in our hands. Its graphics and interactivity capabilities were stronger than ever and fit perfectly into the show. Encouraged by that success, we decided to raise the bar this year. But while preparing for the show, we had to answer one daunting question: how could we please an audience so accustomed to the fancy graphics, animations and effects of Hollywood? Well, the answer was obvious. Just do what Mathematica does best: working with mathematical formulas, generating algorithmic content, visualizing real-world data... These things are at the core of the system, and we knew they’d draw a lot of interest at SIGGRAPH.
Yu-Sung Chang, Technical Communication & Strategy Group
Announcements & Events

The Space of All Possible Bridge Shapes

When I hear about something like Wednesday’s bridge collapse, I immediately wonder whether any of the science I’ve worked on can be of any help. Bridge design is one of the classic—almost iconic—successes of traditional mathematical science. And when I first talked about A New Kind of Science, a not uncommon reaction was precisely, “But […]

Stephen Wolfram
Announcements & Events

Taking Control of Mathematica

Who would think you could get so much work done just by twiddling your thumbs? Mathematica 6 brings with it a host of new ways to interact with your output. Want to set up an arbitrary number of parameters and explore their multi-dimensional space? That’s trivial to do with the Manipulate function. However, once you start exploring this space, you immediately realize that your exploration is restricted by the mouse pointer. There’s only one pointer on the screen. It can only interact with one control (slider, checkbox or whatever) at a time. Fortunately, hardware developers realized long ago---long before multi-touch interfaces like Apple’s iPhone, which are in vogue at the moment---that most people have 10 fingers and so in theory can access many more degrees of freedom than the two degrees provided by a typical mouse. Enter the gamepad.
Lou D'Andria, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Announcements & Events

A New Kind of Building?

I recently came back from the NKS 2007 Summer School and the 2007 Wolfram Science conference. This was my third time at the Summer School, after being a student in 2003 and an instructor in 2005. Being an instructor at the NKS Summer School means giving lectures about A New Kind of Science, but the most intense part is supervising student projects. Each Summer School student carries out a project that can be used in a variety of ways---for example, some are published in academic journals, used as the basis of doctoral dissertations or incorporated into professional activity. (A nice feature of this year’s Summer School was that students could now also present their work in the Wolfram Demonstrations Project.) This year I supervised five projects, with topics ranging from social networks to finite state automata. And as an example, I thought I’d write a little bit about the story of NKS 2007 student Maurice Martel’s work.
Fred Meinberg, Special Projects Group
Announcements & Events

Science: Live and in Public

Our 2007 NKS Summer School started about two weeks ago, and one of my roles there was to show a little of how NKS is done. In the past, it would have been pretty unrealistic to show this in any kind of live way. But with computer experiments, and especially with Mathematica, that’s changed. And […]

Stephen Wolfram
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