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News, Views & Insights

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
Education & Academic

Creating Mathematical Gems in the Wolfram Language

The Wolfram Community group dedicated to visual arts is abound with technically and aesthetically stunning contributions. Many of these posts come from prolific contributor Clayton Shonkwiler, who has racked up over 75 "staff pick" accolades. Recently I got the chance to interview him and learn more about the role of the Wolfram Language in his art and creative process. But first, I asked Wolfram Community's staff lead, Vitaliy Kaurov, what makes Shonkwiler a standout among mathematical artists.
Michael Gammon, Blog Administrator, Document & Media Systems
Best of Blog

Finding X in Espresso: Adventures in Computational Lexicology

When Does a Word Become a Word?

"A shot of expresso, please." "You mean 'espresso,' don't you?" A baffled customer, a smug barista---media is abuzz with one version or another of this story. But the real question is not whether "expresso" is a correct spelling, but rather how spellings evolve and enter dictionaries. Lexicographers do not directly decide that; the data does. Long and frequent usage may qualify a word for endorsement. Moreover, I believe the emergent proliferation of computational approaches can help to form an even deeper insight into the language. The tale of expresso is a thriller from a computational perspective.
Vitaliy Kaurov, Director of Community Engagement
Best of Blog

How to Win at Risk: Exact Probabilities

The classic board game Risk involves conquering the world by winning battles that are played out using dice. There are lots of places on the web where you can find out the odds of winning a battle given the number of armies that each player has. However, all the ones that I have seen do this by Monte Carlo simulation, and so are innately approximate. The Wolfram Language makes it so easy to work out the exact values that I couldn't resist calculating them once and for all.
Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
Best of Blog

What Is a Computational Essay?

A Powerful Way to Express Ideas People are used to producing prose—and sometimes pictures—to express themselves. But in the modern age of computation, something new has become possible that I’d like to call the computational essay. I’ve been working on building the technology to support computational essays for several decades, but it’s only very recently […]

Stephen Wolfram
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