News, Views & Insights
The Drumbeat of Releases Continues… Just under six months ago (176 days ago, to be precise) we released Version 14.1. Today I’m pleased to announce that we’re releasing Version 14.2, delivering the latest from our R&D pipeline. This is an exciting time for our technology, both in terms of what we’re now able to implement, […]
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.
Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram System Modeler trial. The Swedish Air Force has an annual tradition of greeting the people of Sweden at the end of the year by flying their fighter jets in a formation shaped like a Christmas tree. Besides welcoming everyone, this tradition plays a role as a valuable rehearsal for the fighter pilots in formation flying and is a way to show their presence. Thus, the large amounts of fuel burned by the fighter jets, which are most certainly not known for their fuel efficiency, may be excused in this tradition.
That ChatGPT can automatically generate something that reads even superficially like human-written text is remarkable, and unexpected. But how does it do it? And why does it work? My purpose here is to give a rough outline of what’s going on inside ChatGPT—and then to explore why it is that it can do so well […]
Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram System Modeler trial. Have you ever watched Shark Tank or Dragons’ Den? Were you intrigued by the pitches of the founders? After the pitch, you might have heard the sharks or the dragons asking about the growth rate, profit or market size. What do those numbers say about a company? Are losses in the initial years always bad?
Over the last few days, I’ve been asked how ChatGPT (particularly allied to Wolfram|Alpha) will affect education, how it relates to “computational literacy for all” and the computer-based mathematics education that my book The Math(s) Fix provides a blueprint for.
Wolfram is involved in Edtech in many other ways too; it will be great seeing how the full range of powerful integrations emerge that can deliver better education.
It’s always amazing when things suddenly “just work”. It happened to us with Wolfram|Alpha back in 2009. It happened with our Physics Project in 2020. And it’s happening now with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
I’ve been tracking neural net technology for a long time (about 43 years, actually). And even having watched developments in the past few years I find the performance of ChatGPT thoroughly remarkable. Finally, and suddenly, here’s a system that can successfully generate text about almost anything—that’s very comparable to what humans might write. It’s impressive, and useful. And, as I’ll discuss elsewhere, I think its success is probably telling us some very fundamental things about the nature of human thinking.
Wolfram Language has a wealth of built-in functions that require little or no programming, but there are special cases that require additional skill and knowledge to get the code to do things that go beyond those built-in capabilities. Wolfram U is pleased to announce a new free interactive course by veteran Wolfram programmer and instructor Dave Withoff that offers a collection of useful tips and instruction for intermediate-level programmers. This course will expand your understanding of Wolfram Language and help you to write more complex programs for custom results.
Let me start by saying that for beginners to the language, the free interactive course An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language continues to be the best way to start learning how to write programs with Wolfram Language. A Guide to Programming with Wolfram Language is intended as a follow-on course for users who are ready to delve deeper into the language.
If you’re already familiar with the language and prepared to dive in to more advanced topics, you can explore the interactive course by clicking the following image before reading the rest of the blog post.
To introduce Wolfram Language and modern computational thinking to the world, Stephen Wolfram published An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language in 2015. Functionality gains for the Wolfram Cloud soon made it possible to turn the book into a full interactive online course that includes videos, exercises and a scratch notebook in an easy-to-use interface, available to anyone with an internet connection. Indeed, lessons from the introductory course have been viewed over a million times on computers, tablets and smartphones around the globe since its launch.
The new intermediate-level programming course grew out of user interest for more advanced lessons and a desire to address questions from experienced users related to topics such as assignments and evaluation rules, patterns, program interfaces and plotting. Dave Withoff has been using Wolfram Language since the release of Mathematica 1.2 in 1989. Dave was a developer of packages and internal code for early versions of Mathematica and is an experienced instructor in the world of academia and with Wolfram U. He has used his expertise with the language to create the new course lessons, sharing tips and techniques he has developed over the years.
Students should have some knowledge of Wolfram Language programming before they begin the course, which includes intermediate-level topics, such as the structure of expressions, variable localization and other details about the basic design of the system. Later sections include lessons on speed and memory efficiency, construction of interactive user interfaces, data visualization and debugging.
Here is a quick look at some of the lessons included in the course (shown in the table of contents in the left-hand column):
Even though the content goes beyond the introductory level, it should not take very long to complete this course. You should be able to finish the 22 short videos and eight quizzes in about four hours. The course tracks your progress automatically and generates your personalized certificate of course completion when you finish.
The next few sections of the blog post describe the different interactive course components in detail.
The body of the course is a set of 22 lessons, starting with “Multiparadigm Programming.” This introductory lesson uses hands-on examples to illustrate different programming styles, followed by dedicated lessons on functional and rule-based programming that demonstrate different ways of writing programs in Wolfram Language.
Course sections include "Basic Language Structure," "Values and Variables," "Common Special Expressions," "Program Interfaces," "Plotting," "Analyzing and Optimizing Programs" and "Selected Applications." Each section has two or three lessons and an auto-graded quiz to test your understanding.
The videos range from 6 to 15 minutes in length, and each video is accompanied by a lesson notebook displayed on the right-hand side of the screen. There is an embedded scratch notebook where you can copy and paste Wolfram Language input directly from the lesson so you can try the examples for yourself.
Each lesson comes with a set of exercises to practice the concepts. A detailed solution is provided for every exercise because the course is designed for independent study. The following shows an example from the lesson on knowledge representation, from the "Program Interfaces" section:
The notebooks with the exercises are interactive, so students can try variations of each problem in the Wolfram Cloud. In particular, they are encouraged to change the variables in examples and investigate the documentation and options available for built-in functions.
At the end of each section is a short, multiple-choice quiz with 10 problems. The quiz problems are at roughly the same level as those shown in the lessons, and a student who reviews the section thoroughly should have no difficulty in doing well on the quiz.
Students will receive instant feedback about their answers to the quiz questions, and they are encouraged to try hand and computer calculations to solve them.
Students are encouraged to watch all the lessons and attempt the quizzes in the recommended sequence because course topics may rely on earlier concepts and techniques. When you complete the course, you can download a personalized certificate of completion. You will earn a course certificate after watching all the lessons and passing all the quizzes. Your progress is tracked automatically for you within the course using your Wolfram ID, making it easy to just pick up where you left off if you exit and return to the course later. A course certificate adds value to your professional resume, school and job applications or social media profile. This course provides useful preparation for the Wolfram Language Level I certification exam, and students are encouraged to take the exam and earn a proficiency certification.
Wolfram U offered a sneak peek of the course lessons and quizzes to Daily Study Group participants this spring, and we received some valuable feedback. Here is what participants said:
“This course improves efficiency by enabling me to keypunch less and giving me the knowledge to reduce computer run time.” “[Exercises] are always helpful and fun.” “Multiple Choice questions are adequate to test one’s knowledge. The best exercises were those when we were asked to program a solution for a problem with a specific outcome. It shows the versatility of Wolfram Language.” “I refer to the various notebooks included in the course to serve as examples and demonstrations of concepts applicable to the task on which I am working. Those dealing with symbolic computation are most helpful.” “The programming guide was very helpful, provided insights into the language.”I think you’ll find this new interactive course to be an enjoyable learning experience on your journey to become a more advanced and skilled user of Wolfram Language, just like our Daily Study Group cohort did. I hope you’ll reach out to let us know about the ways you find the course helpful and to share stories about your results. As always, we welcome any comments or suggestions for future courses and certifications.
I’m grateful to Andre Kuzniarek at Wolfram for suggesting the course concept; to the author, Dave Withoff, for answering the call to create this collection of programming topics; and to the Wolfram U staff who contributed to making it a reality. I would specifically like to acknowledge Cassidy Hinkle, Laura Crawford and Mariah Laugesen of the Wolfram U team.
| Want more help? Register for one of Wolfram U’s Daily Study Groups. |
In 2020 it was Versions 12.1 and 12.2; in 2021 Versions 12.3 and 13.0. In late June this year it was Version 13.1. And now we’re releasing Version 13.2. We continue to have a huge pipeline of R&D, some short term, some medium term, some long term (like decade-plus). Our goal is to deliver timely […]