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Announcements & Events

Wolfram Technology Conference 2014: Register Now!

It’s been a productive 2014 already here at Wolfram with tons of new technology being released and a whole new world of possibilities opening up. One great way to learn more about these accomplishments is to join us at the 2014 Wolfram Technology Conference. The conference takes place Wednesday, October 22 through Friday, October 24, in Champaign, Illinois (our headquarters). This year's talks will highlight the Wolfram Language and the thriving ecosystem growing around it, including the new Wolfram Programming Cloud, Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, SystemModeler, and more. At the conference, you’ll hear from Stephen Wolfram himself. Plus our top Wolfram developers will cover exciting new features in-depth, while industry experts will show you how you can use Wolfram technologies in your everyday work to accomplish more--and do so more efficiently.
Wolfram Blog Team
Products

How the Wolfram Language Measures Up

Back in 2012, Jon McLoone wrote a program that analyzed the coding examples of over 500 programming languages that were compiled on the wiki site Rosetta Code. He compared the programming language of Mathematica (now officially named the Wolfram Language) to 14 of the most popular and relevant languages, and found that most programs can be written in the Wolfram Language with 1/2 to 1/10 as much code---even as tasks become larger and more complex. We were curious to see how the Wolfram Language continues to stack up, since a lot has happened in the last two years. So we updated and re-ran Jon's code, and, much to our excitement (though we really weren't all that surprised), the Wolfram Language remains largely superior by all accounts! Keep in mind that the programming tasks at Rosetta Code are the typical kinds of exercises that you can write in conventional programming languages: editing text, implementing quicksort, or solving the Towers of Hanoi. You wouldn’t even think of dashing off a program in C to do handwriting recognition, yet that’s a one-liner in the Wolfram Language. And since the Wolfram Language’s ultra-high-level constructs are designed to match the way people think about solving problems, writing programs in it is usually easier than in other languages. In spite of the Rosetta Code tasks being relatively low-level applications, the Wolfram Language still wins handily on code length compared to every other language. Here's the same graph as in Jon's 2012 post comparing the Wolfram Language to C. Each point gives the character counts of the same task programmed in the Wolfram Language and C. Notice the Wolfram Language still remains shorter for almost every task, staying mostly underneath the dashed one-to-one line: The same holds true for Python:
Wolfram Blog Team
Computation & Analysis

The Wolfram Technology Conference Egg-Bot Challenge Winners

We have a programming competition every year at the Wolfram Technology Conference, which in past years was the Mathematica One-Liner Competition (2010, 2011). This year we held the Egg-Bot Challenge, a change of pace to give attendees a chance to exercise their graphics skills. The idea of the competition was to use Mathematica to generate designs that could be plotted on spheres via Egg-Bots, computer-controlled plotters that draw on eggs, Ping-Pong balls, light bulbs, mini-pumpkins, golf balls... nearly anything spherical or ovoid that is less than four inches in diameter.
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Announcements & Events

Mathematica 9 Is Released Today!

I’m excited to be able to announce that today we’re releasing Mathematica 9—and it’s big! A whole array of new ideas and new application areas… and major advances along a great many algorithmic frontiers. Next year Mathematica will be 25 years old (and all sorts of festivities are planned!). And in that quarter century we’ve […]

Stephen Wolfram
Announcements & Events

Get Ready for the Wolfram Technology Conference 2012

Before you know it, it'll be October and time for the Wolfram Technology Conference 2012. We thought you'd be interested in finding out more about some of the things we're doing this year. First, we're offering a social networking and personalized schedule-building tool for all registered attendees. You can connect with your fellow attendees, arrange meetings with Wolfram staff and other participants, create your schedule, and rate talks and share comments throughout the conference. Feel free to dive right in and create your own profile.
Wolfram Blog Team
Announcements & Events

Welcome to the Wolfram Technology Conference 2010

The Wolfram Technology Conference 2010 is off to a great start! In his opening keynote, Wolfram Research Founder and CEO Stephen Wolfram unveiled the forthcoming Mathematica 8. Through real-time demonstrations, attendees got to see many of the new features at work, including enhanced image processing capabilities, texture mapping, control systems, wavelet analysis, and much more. Over 500 new functions are being added in Version 8—almost the same as the total amount included in the original Version 1! This year's schedule covers a broad range of topics presented by users and Wolfram developers, including applications for probability and statistics, CUDA and Open CL programming, creating visualizations with Mathematica, and high-performance computation.
Wolfram Blog Team
Design & Visualization

Designing the Brick Wall of the Future

I created this design for a brick wall in Mathematica. Constructing it would be tedious and technically demanding work indeed, requiring numerous jigs and repeated measurements, not to mention an unusually skilled mason. Or a robot. A few groups have begun to experiment with the idea of robotically laid brick construction, most notably the Swiss firm Gramazio & Kohler (Facade Gantenbein Winery, Structural Oscillations), and recently, students at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (On the Bri(n)ck). Inspired by these efforts, I set out to investigate the possibilities of robotic brick-wall construction with Mathematica.
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Products

Secret Codes in the Wolfram Demonstrations Project (But No Dinosaurs)

Recent Demonstrations: Visual Encryption

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.
Dillon Tracy, Senior Kernel Developer, Core Mathematica Engineering
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