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Leading Edge

New in the Wolfram Language: FindTextualAnswer

Are you ever certain that somewhere in a text or set of texts, the answer to a pressing question is waiting to be found, but you don't want to take the time to skim through thousands of words to find what you're looking for? Well, soon the Wolfram Language will provide concise answers to your specific, fact-based questions directed toward an unstructured collection of texts (with a technology very different from that of Wolfram|Alpha, which is based on a carefully curated knowledgebase). Let's start with the essence of FindTextualAnswer. This feature, available in the upcoming release of the Wolfram Language, answers questions by quoting the most appropriate excerpts of a text that is presumed to contain the relevant information.
Jérôme Louradour, Machine Learning
Announcements & Events

Wolfram News Roundup: Neural Net Connectivity, Gravitational Wave Discoveries and More

It's been an exciting beginning to the new year here at Wolfram Research with the coming release of Version 11.3 of the Wolfram Language, a soft announcement of the Wolfram Neural Net Repository and our launch of multiparadigm data science. As part of the new year, we're also launching some new content in the Public Relations department. As you may have seen, each month we are highlighting the accomplishments of our members on Wolfram Community. We are also recapping news and events about Wolfram each month. So, in case you missed the latest, check out these news stories:
Swede White, Public Relations Manager
Education & Academic

Cultivating New Solutions for the Orchard-Planting Problem

Some trees are planted in an orchard. What is the maximum possible number of distinct lines of three trees? In his 1821 book Rational Amusement for Winter Evenings, J. Jackson put it this way: Fain would I plant a grove in rows But how must I its form compose             With three trees in each row; To have as many rows as trees; Now tell me, artists, if you please:             'Tis all I want to know. Those familiar with tic-tac-toe, three-in-a-row might wonder how difficult this problem could be, but it’s actually been looked at by some of the most prominent mathematicians of the past and present. This essay presents many new solutions that haven’t been seen before, shows a general method for finding more solutions and points out where current best solutions are improvable.
Ed Pegg Jr, Scientific Information Editor, Scientific Information Group
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
Current Events & History

Running the Numbers with the Illinois Marathon Viewer

I love to run. A lot. And many of my coworkers do too. You can find us everywhere, and all the time: on roads, in parks, on hills and mountains, and even running up and down parking decks, a flat lander's version of hills. And if there is a marathon to be run, we'll be there as well. With all of the internal interest in running marathons, Wolfram Research created this Marathon Viewer as a sponsorship project for the Christie Clinic Illinois Marathon. Here are four of us, shown as dots, participating in the 2017 Illinois Marathon: How did the above animation and the in-depth look at our performance come about? Read on to find out.
Eila Stiegler, Quality Analysis Manager, Wolfram|Alpha Quality Analysis Jeff Bryant, Research Programmer, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Education & Academic

Slicing Silhouettes of Jupiter: Processing JunoCam Images

With the images from the Juno mission being made available to the public, I thought it might be fun to try my hand at some image processing with them. Though my background is not in image processing, the Wolfram Language has some really nice tools that lessen the learning curve, so you can focus on what you want to do vs. how to do it.
Jesse Dohmann, Technical Documentation Writer, Document & Media Systems
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
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