News, Views & Insights
Nearly a year and a half ago—just a few months after ChatGPT burst on the scene—we introduced the first version of our Chat Notebook technology to integrate LLM-based chat into Wolfram Notebooks. For the past year and a half we’ve been building on those foundations. And today I’m excited to be able to announce that we’re releasing the fruits of those efforts: the first version of our Wolfram Notebook Assistant.
Today we celebrate the arrival of the 36th (x.x) version of the Wolfram Language and Mathematica: Version 14.1. We’ve been doing this since 1986: continually inventing new ideas and implementing them in our larger and larger tower of technology. And it’s always very satisfying to be able to deliver our latest achievements to the world.
As an astronomy enthusiast, I try to keep up on all the various goings-on in astronomy news. Astronomy, being a primarily visual science, often lends itself quite well to computer visualization. Recently, NASA landed on Mars again, this time near one of the Martian poles in an attempt to study the ice and landscape of this frigid region. Is there water ice there, or just dry ice made of frozen carbon dioxide? How much of each? That's what the Phoenix Mars Lander was sent to try to unravel.
Solar Power Grid Unfurled—image courtesy of NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of ArizonaAs an editor for the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, I often get quite interested in new astronomy-related Demonstrations. One particular set, written by Sándor Kabai, focuses on the mechanics of not only the Phoenix Mars Lander, but probes from the past as well.
Landers, as opposed to other spacecraft, must overcome unique design challenges. Unlike orbiters, which typically have only sensors and cameras, landers usually have mechanical components to directly manipulate the surrounding environment like an astronaut could. These components come in many forms, such as wheels, scoops, drilling instruments and so on, which make landers much more interesting to visualize interactively. Although these are not strictly astronomy, more engineering, few would argue that they are space-related and therefore pretty cool!When I was a kid, dinosaurs and secret codes were topics of surefire interest, since one was useful for eating your little sister and the other one for denying her the password to the clubhouse. I haven't noticed any Demonstrations about dinosaurs yet (I continue to keep an eye out), but interesting ones about cryptography turn up regularly, including a couple of neat recent entries on visual encryption: Michael Schrieber's Visual Encryption Pad and Paul van der Schaaf's Graphical Modulo-4 Image Encryption.
One cipher (if you can call it that) common in my kiddie code books involved printing a message in red stipple overlaid with a noise field of blue stipple. You could use the piece of red cellophane included in the back of the book to mask out the blue part and reveal the secret message. The Visual Encryption Pad Demonstration is the sophisticated cousin of this scheme, involving the overlay of a random bit mask (the key) with another bit mask of the same size (the message). Applying a set of rules to the combination of bits at a given pixel (in the case of this Demonstration, XNOR) reveals the message, which might look like this:
If your spies in the field don't have computers, and you are limited to passing around messages on microfilm or something, then the only bit-combination rule set you will be able to use is OR. And of course your messages are limited to one bit per pixel. The Graphical Modulo-4 Image Encryption> scheme, on the other hand, can encode more than one bit per pixel, even on physical media. Let me quote some snippets of the Demonstration's code and describe how they work, and then I'll discuss a couple of extensions that suggest themselves.You’ve probably seen examples of photo mosaics where each “tile” in the mosaic is a tiny photograph, selected so the overall brightness and color of the tiny photo averages out to the brightness and color needed for its position in the overall mosaic.
Following a suggestion by Ed Pegg, I suddenly found it impossible to imagine life without a photo mosaic of Dmitri Mendeleev, the principal inventor of the periodic table, made out of photographs of the elements.
It was convenient in this regard that I possess the world’s largest stock library of photographs of the chemical elements—about 2,000 photographs of roughly 1,550 different physical samples of the pure and applied elements—along with a photograph of Mendeleev and a bit of software called Mathematica. (You can see this library at periodictable.com; don’t forget to order a copy of my photo periodic table poster.)
You might think that creating photo mosaics is a standard task for which software, probably even free software, is available. And for all I know it is. But upon brief reflection I decided it would probably be faster and easier for me to write code to do this from scratch in Mathematica than it would be to find something to download and then figure out how to use it.
It turns out you can do a first pass at it with three lines of input.