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Find Waldo Faster

Martin Handford can spend weeks creating a single Where's Waldo puzzle hiding a tiny red and white striped character wearing Lennon glasses and a bobble hat among an ocean of cartoon figures that are immersed in amusing activities. Finding Waldo is the puzzle's objective, so hiding him well, perhaps, is even more challenging. Martin once said, "As I work my way through a picture, I add Wally when I come to what I feel is a good place to hide him." Aware of this, Ben Blatt from Slate magazine wondered if it's possible "to master Where's Waldo by mapping Handford's patterns?" Ben devised a simple trick to speed up a Waldo search. In a sense, it's the same observation that allowed Jon McLoone to write an algorithm that can beat a human in a Rock-Paper-Scissors game. As Jon puts it, "we can rely on the fact that humans are not very good at being random."
Vitaliy Kaurov, Director of Community Engagement
Education & Academic

Why Alan Turing Has Already Won, No Matter How The Imitation Game Does at the Oscars

When I was invited to join the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee in 2008 by Professor Barry Cooper to prepare for the Alan Turing Year in 2012, I would have never imagined that just a few years later, Turing's life and work would have gained sufficient public attention to become the subject of a Hollywood-style feature film, nor that said movie would go on to earn eight Oscar nominations.
Hector Zenil, Editor of the Complex Systems journal
Products

Q&A with Michael Tiller, Author of Modelica by Example

Modelica is the object-oriented modeling language used in SystemModeler to model components and systems. When I first learned Modelica, I read all books available about the language (there are not that many!) and found the book Introduction to Physical Modeling with Modelica by Michael Tiller to be the best out there. In 2012, when Michael started a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of a Creative Commons licensed book about Modelica, I was the first person to back it, and Wolfram Research became one of the gold sponsors of the book. A new key feature in SystemModeler 4.0 is the full Modelica by Example book included in the product. This makes it much easier to get started learning Modelica. I had the opportunity to ask Michael a couple of questions about the new book and Modelica.
Johan Rhodin, Kernel Developer, Mathematica Algorithm R&D
Products

Sweet Tweets: Valentine’s Day Tweet-a-Program Challenge

As Valentine's Day approaches, Wolfram is holding a Tweet-a-Program challenge. To help us celebrate the romantic holiday, tweet us your best Valentine-themed Wolfram Language code. As with our other challenges, we'll pin, retweet, and share your submissions with our followers—and we'll use the Wolfram Language to randomly select winning tweets, along with one or two of our favorites. If you’re a lucky winner, we’ll send you a Wolfram T-shirt! Submissions aren't limited to heart-themed programs, but check out these examples if you need a little inspiration:
Emily Suess, Technical Writer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Products

MHacks V’s Winning Hack Uses Wolfram Programming Cloud

Draw Anything, an iOS app designed and created by Olivia Walch and Matt Jacobs, was the winning hack at the recent MHacks V. Utilizing the power of Wolfram Programming Cloud, the two Draw Anything hackers came out on top after a fierce competition between more than 250 talented teams, made up of 1,200 hackers representing over 100 universities. Students from around the world came to learn, network, and "spend 36 hours building anything they can imagine."
Wolfram Blog Team
Education & Academic

Jacob Bernoulli’s Legacy in Mathematica

January 16, 2015, marks the 360th birthday anniversary of Jacob Bernoulli (also James, or Jacques). Jacob Bernoulli was the first mathematician in the Bernoulli family, which produced many notable mathematicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jacob Bernoulli's mathematical legacy is rich. He introduced Bernoulli numbers, solved the Bernoulli differential equation, studied the Bernoulli trials process, proved the Bernoulli inequality, discovered the number e, and demonstrated the weak law of large numbers (Bernoulli's theorem).
Oleksandr Pavlyk, Senior Kernel Developer, Algorithms R&D
Products

A Mathematical Modeling Approach to Monitoring Liver Function in Drug Trials

Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. Mathematical modeling is not just used for understanding and designing new products and drugs; modeling can also be used in health care, and in the future, your doctor might examine your liver with a mathematical model just like the one researchers at AstraZeneca have developed. The liver is a vital organ, and currently there isn't really a way to compensate for loss of liver function in the long term. The liver performs a wide range of functions, including detoxification, protein synthesis, and secretion of compounds necessary for digestion, just to mention a few. In the US and Europe, up to 15 % of all acute liver failure cases are due to drug-induced liver injury, and the risk of injuring the liver is of major concern in testing new drug candidates. So in order to safely monitor the impact of a new drug candidate on the liver, researchers at the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca have recently published a method for evaluating liver function that combines magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and mathematical modeling---potentially allowing for early identification of any reduced liver function in humans. Last year, Wolfram MathCore and AstraZeneca worked together on a project where we investigated some modifications of AstraZeneca's modeling framework. We presented the promising results at the ISMRM-ESMRMB Joint Annual Meeting, which is the major international magnetic resonance conference. In this blog post, I'll show how the Wolfram Language was used to calculate liver function and how more complex models of liver function can be implemented in Wolfram SystemModeler.
Mikael Forsgren, Senior Applications Engineer, SystemModeler
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