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September 21, 2014

A Closed Future for Mathematics?

Filed under: Mathematica,Mathematics,Wolfram Language,WolframAlpha — Patrick Durusau @ 3:18 pm

A Closed Future for Mathematics? by Eric Raymond.

From the post:

In a blog post on Computational Knowledge and the Future of Pure Mathematics Stephen Wolfram lays out a vision that is in many ways exciting and challenging. What if all of mathematics could be expressed in a common formal notation, stored in computers so it is searchable and amenable to computer-assisted discovery and proof of new theorems?

…

… to be trusted, the entire system will need to be transparent top to bottom. The design, the data representations, and the implementation code for its software must all be freely auditable by third-party mathematical topic experts and mathematically literate software engineers.

Eric identifies three (3) types of errors that may exist inside the proposed closed system from Wolfram.

Is transparency of a Wolfram solution the only way to trust a Wolfram solution?

For any operation or series of operations performed with Wolfram software, you could perform the same operation in one or more open or closed source systems and see if the results agree. The more often they agree for some set of operations the greater your confidence in those operations with Wolfram software.

That doesn’t mean that the next operation or a change in the order of operations is going to produce a trustworthy result. Just that for some specified set of operations in a particular order with specified data that you obtained the same result from multiple software solutions.

It could be that all the software solutions implement the same incorrect algorithm, the same valid algorithm incorrectly, or errors in search engines searching a mathematical database (which could only be evaluated against the data being searched).

Where N is the number of non-Wolfram software packages you are using to check the Wolfram-based solution and W represents the amount of work to obtain a solution, the total work required is N x W.

In addition to not resulting in the trust Eric is describing, it is an increase in your workload.

I first saw this in a tweet by Michael Nielsen.

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June 23, 2014

Wolfram Programming Cloud Is Live!

Filed under: Cloud Computing,Mathematica,Wolfram Language,WolframAlpha — Patrick Durusau @ 6:25 pm

Wolfram Programming Cloud Is Live! by Stephen Wolfram.

From the post:

Twenty-six years ago today we launched Mathematica 1.0. And I am excited that today we have what I think is another historic moment: the launch of Wolfram Programming Cloud—the first in a sequence of products based on the new Wolfram Language.

My goal with the Wolfram Language in general—and Wolfram Programming Cloud in particular—is to redefine the process of programming, and to automate as much as possible, so that once a human can express what they want to do with sufficient clarity, all the details of how it is done should be handled automatically.

I’ve been working toward this for nearly 30 years, gradually building up the technology stack that is needed—at first in Mathematica, later also in Wolfram|Alpha, and now in definitive form in the Wolfram Language. The Wolfram Language, as I have explained elsewhere, is a new type of programming language: a knowledge-based language, whose philosophy is to build in as much knowledge about computation and about the world as possible—so that, among other things, as much as possible can be automated.

The Wolfram Programming Cloud is an application of the Wolfram Language—specifically for programming, and for creating and deploying cloud-based programs.

How does it work? Well, you should try it out! It’s incredibly simple to get started. Just go to the Wolfram Programming Cloud in any web browser, log in, and press New. You’ll get what we call a notebook (yes, we invented those more than 25 years ago, for Mathematica). Then you just start typing code.

…

I am waiting to validate my email address to access the Wolfram portal.

It will take weeks to evaluate some of the claims made for the portal but I can attest that the Wolfram site in general remains very responsive, despite what must be snowballing load today.

That in and of itself is a good sign.

Enjoy!

I first saw this in a tweet by Christophe Lalanne.

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February 25, 2014

Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [Echoes of Veg-o-matic?]

Filed under: Functional Programming,Wolfram Language — Patrick Durusau @ 2:54 pm

Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language by Stephen Wolfram.

From the post:

We’re getting closer to the first official release of the Wolfram Language—so I am starting to demo it more publicly.

Here’s a short video demo I just made. It’s amazing to me how much of this is based on things I hadn’t even thought of just a few months ago. Knowledge-based programming is going to be much bigger than I imagined…

You really need to watch this video.

Impressive demo but how does it run on ordinary hardware and network connectivity?

Not unlike the old Veg-o-matic commercial:

Notice where the table top is locate relative to his waist. Do you have a table like that at home? If not, the Veg-o-matic isn’t going to work the same for you.

Was Stephen on his local supercomputer cluster or a laptop?

Excited but more details needed.

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November 21, 2013

Mathematica on every Raspberry Pi?

Filed under: Mathematica,Wolfram Language — Patrick Durusau @ 7:35 pm

Putting the Wolfram Language (and Mathematica) on Every Raspberry Pi by Stephen Wolfram.

From the post:

Last week I wrote about our large-scale plan to use new technology we’re building to inject sophisticated computation and knowledge into everything. Today I’m pleased to announce a step in that direction: working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, effective immediately there’s a pilot release of the Wolfram Language—as well as Mathematica—that will soon be bundled as part of the standard system software for every Raspberry Pi computer.

In effect, this is a technology preview: it’s an early, unfinished, glimpse of the Wolfram Language. Quite soon the Wolfram Language is going to start showing up in lots of places, notably on the web and in the cloud. But I’m excited that the timing has worked out so that we’re able to give the Raspberry Pi community—with its emphasis on education and invention—the very first chance to put the Wolfram Language into action.

I’m a great believer in the importance of programming as a central component of education. And I’m excited that with the Wolfram Language I think we finally have a powerful programming language worthy of the next generation. We’ve got a language that’s not mostly concerned with the details of computers, but is instead about being able to understand and create things on the basis of huge amounts of built-in computational ability and knowledge.

It’s tremendously satisfying—and educational. Writing a tiny program, perhaps not even a line long, and already having something really interesting happen. And then being able to scale up larger and larger. Making use of all the powerful programming paradigms that are built into the Wolfram Language.

Awesome!

From the Raspberry PI blog:

Future Raspbian images will ship with the Wolfram Language and Mathematica by default; existing users with at least 600MB of free space on their SD card can install them today by typing:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wolfram-engine
You’ll find Mathematica in the app launcher under the Education menu.

Plus:

Wolfram Language Documentation.

Preliminary version is online only. Will take a bit of navigating to get a sense of the language as a whole.

Do you think Raspberry Pi sales are about to go through the roof? ;-)

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November 14, 2013

Somthing Very Big Is Coming… [Wolfram Language]

Filed under: Homoiconic,Lisp,Mathematica,Wolfram Language — Patrick Durusau @ 10:51 am

Something Very Big Is Coming: Our Most Important Technology Project Yet by Stephen Wolfram.

From the post:

Computational knowledge. Symbolic programming. Algorithm automation. Dynamic interactivity. Natural language. Computable documents. The cloud. Connected devices. Symbolic ontology. Algorithm discovery. These are all things we’ve been energetically working on—mostly for years—in the context of Wolfram|Alpha, Mathematica, CDF and so on.

But recently something amazing has happened. We’ve figured out how to take all these threads, and all the technology we’ve built, to create something at a whole different level. The power of what is emerging continues to surprise me. But already I think it’s clear that it’s going to be profoundly important in the technological world, and beyond.

At some level it’s a vast unified web of technology that builds on what we’ve created over the past quarter century. At some level it’s an intellectual structure that actualizes a new computational view of the world. And at some level it’s a practical system and framework that’s going to be a fount of incredibly useful new services and products.

…

A crucial building block of all this is what we’re calling the Wolfram Language.

In a sense, the Wolfram Language has been incubating inside Mathematica for more than 25 years. It’s the language of Mathematica, and CDF—and the language used to implement Wolfram|Alpha. But now—considerably extended, and unified with the knowledgebase of Wolfram|Alpha—it’s about to emerge on its own, ready to be at the center of a remarkable constellation of new developments.

We call it the Wolfram Language because it is a language. But it’s a new and different kind of language. It’s a general-purpose knowledge-based language. That covers all forms of computing, in a new way.

There are plenty of existing general-purpose computer languages. But their vision is very different—and in a sense much more modest—than the Wolfram Language. They concentrate on managing the structure of programs, keeping the language itself small in scope, and relying on a web of external libraries for additional functionality. In the Wolfram Language my concept from the very beginning has been to create a single tightly integrated system in which as much as possible is included right in the language itself.

And so in the Wolfram Language, built right into the language, are capabilities for laying out graphs or doing image processing or creating user interfaces or whatever. Inside there’s a giant web of algorithms—by far the largest ever assembled, and many invented by us. And there are then thousands of carefully designed functions set up to use these algorithms to perform operations as automatically as possible.

It’s not possible to evaluate the claims that Stephen makes in this post without access to the Wolfram language.

But, given his track record, I do think it is important that people across CS begin to prepare to evaluate it upon release.

For example, Stephen says:

In most languages there’s a sharp distinction between programs, and data, and the output of programs. Not so in the Wolfram Language. It’s all completely fluid. Data becomes algorithmic. Algorithms become data. There’s no distinction needed between code and data. And everything becomes both intrinsically scriptable, and intrinsically interactive. And there’s both a new level of interoperability, and a new level of modularity.

Languages that don’t distinguish between programs and are called homoiconic languages.

One example of a homoiconic language is Lisp, first specified in 1958.

I would not call homoiconicity a “new” development, particularly with a homoiconic language from 1958.

Still, I have signed up for early notice of the Wolfram language release and suggest you do the same.

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