Stephen Wolfram Q&A

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Some collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram

Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.

July 24, 2019

From: Interview by Will Carey, Creative Chair

Could the Wolfram code be used to assign meaning to the Arrival logograms effectively be used to assign meanings to any shapes?

No—because there can’t be a general way to do this. Think about the shapes we see in the natural world. What “meaning” do they have? Or think about shapes we see in archaeology. We often don’t know when they were “ornamental”, and when they were “functional”. There is no abstract way to associate meaning with a shape. One needs a whole cultural context to be able to do that. I happen to have written about these issues recently in connection with us humans sending artifacts into space: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2018/01/showing-off-to-the-universe-beacons-for-the-afterlife-of-our-civilization/

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