Stephen Wolfram Q&A
Submit a questionSome collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram
Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.
All
(316)January 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
If you were writing Mathematica today, what would you leave out?
I’ll give you an example of something that I put into Mathematica that I thought was a good idea but that turned out not to be. It was this function called Short. It just has to do with printing our expressions…
It goes through the expression [as] a tree and it has a certain amount of energy that starts off at the top of the tree, Read more
January 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
You’ve spent a significant amount of time doing language design. What does a language designer really spend the bulk of the time doing?
Almost all the time is spent trying to simplify the construct one comes up with. You start off with this idea about what capability you want it to have. Then the trick is, find the simplest, most transparent way to represent that.
January 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
With Mathematica, did you set out to create an application program or a programming language? You sell it as an application.
I viewed the intellectually most significant [part] of the enterprise as being the creation of the elements of a programming language.
[Selling it as an application] has to do with the practical problem of introducing programming languages. Programming languages are a surprisingly slow-moving field. Fortran was invented before I was born and C is more than 20 years old now. Read more
January 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
What does developing a programming language “for its own sake” mean?
If you ask yourself, “What are the languages that have a chance in the next century?” there aren’t very many of them. And I think that Mathematica has more than a chance. That means that we have an example of a language that has pretty modern ideas—it is certainly a big step beyond C and Fortran—and that is already widely used today. Read more
January 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
You’ve considered “making a thing that will probably be called M, that is essentially Mathematica without the mathematics”. But how seriously?
We’ve built little Ms. There is no doubt that Mathematica without the mathematics will exist one day. The main issue for us is to figure out how it makes sense to distribute the thing. Right now there are particular application areas where people have written programs in Mathematica that don’t use the mathematical side of Mathematica, Read more
January 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
What are the virtues of symbolic languages like Mathematica vs. procedurally based languages like Basic?
When you’re working with a procedurally based numerical language, there’s a lot of mysterious hidden state associated with what’s happening. For example, you have a standard program written in C, and you have various data structures, and you have subroutines that call each other and pass pointers to these data structures. Read more
January 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
What were the intellectual roots of Mathematica?
I got to do a test run of some of the ideas in Mathematica in a system called SMP that I built in the late ’70s or early ’80s. It was more oriented toward computer algebra; it wasn’t as ambitious a system as Mathematica. What I did there was a very educational experience. Read more
January 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
When you were first testing your ideas for Mathematica in SMP, it would have been about the time Clocksin and Mellish were bringing Prolog to a wider audience with their book. Were you influenced by Prolog at that time?
No, actually I wasn’t. I had never written a program in Prolog. I’d read the manual. The main thing that I was trying to do was to imitate what seemed to be what happens when you do mathematical calculations; that is, that you are continually applying rules of mathematics. The transformation-rule model has not been widely adopted. Read more
January 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
How did SMP influence Mathematica?
One of the ideas I had in SMP was, “Figure out a good programming paradigm and just stick to it”. This was a mistake. I think it’s not a trivial mistake. You might think, “If there is a natural way to specify how programs should work, that maybe hooks into some way that has to do with how the brain processes ideas about things, Read more
January 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
What kinds of design ideas went into the writing of Mathematica?
One way I tried to design Mathematica was the following: Think about computations that one wants to do, and think about well-defined chunks of those computations that one could give a definite name to and do lots of times. A very simple one might be Nest, a function in Mathematica that is sort of an iteration construct. Read more
January 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
Is there anything you’d do differently if you were writing Mathematica today?
Were I to build Mathematica again I would probably have 5 percent less stuff in it.
February 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
Do you have any opinions on the dominant paradigms of today, and about which will survive into the next decade?
I think the transformational-rule paradigm is working fairly well. I think the functional paradigm is largely working well. I think the procedural paradigm sucks, basically. I think the fundamental problem with it is there’s much too much hidden state in the procedural paradigm. You have these weird variables that are getting updated and things that are happening that you can’t see. Read more
February 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
So one rationale behind procedural programming is that it’s easy to learn. But one rationale for a hidden state is an optimization of some sort. Why do you think people don’t need optimization anymore?
There are very few programs that are written for the first time where execution speed is an issue. When you’re running your word processor, you don’t want the scrolling to be slow, but that’s a different point. If you look at the history of programming-language design, almost every major screw-up is a consequence of people pandering to some optimization, Read more
February 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
What are your thoughts on parallel processing and its relation to language?
One of the questions is, are there paradigms that are applicable to parallel programming that aren’t applicable to sequential programming, and what are they? Functional programming, list-based programming, things like that are readily applicable to parallel systems. In fact, they work very nicely and elegantly in parallel systems. That is indeed the main algorithm that is used in the various [parallel] Fortrans. Read more
March 1, 1993
From: Interview by Paul Wellin, Mathematica in Education
The early computer algebra systems—Macsyma, SMP, etc.—were they used purely as research tools or was there some notion that they might be used in the classroom also?
At that time it was not really practical to think of using these things in the classroom. SMP was built to run on the then-emerging class of mini-computer systems such as VAXes, and VAXes were in the multi-hundred-thousand-dollar price range, so it wasn’t realistic to think of those things being used in a serious way in the classroom.
March 1, 1993
From: Interview by Paul Wellin, Mathematica in Education
What do you think of the state of math and science education in the US right now?
I remember a couple of early experiences interacting with the “computers and education” crowd at conferences. The experiences varied—from me being very pleasantly surprised at how quickly people seemed to be catching on to the potential for this kind of thing, to complete horror at the fact that people like the ones I was seeing were actually teaching young Americans about science or mathematics. Read more
March 1, 1993
From: Interview by Paul Wellin, Mathematica in Education
Why have computer science and mathematics departments diverged so strongly in the recent past?
One of the biggest mistakes of research mathematics in America in the last 50 years has been to let computer science get away. If you look at what was done when computing was young, there was a strong and definite strand of computing that was essentially part of mathematics. The mathematicians rejected it: this was a big mistake. Read more
March 1, 1993
From: Interview by Paul Wellin, Mathematica in Education
Do you think that mathematics and the rest of the sciences will tend to become less distinct, becoming more and more involved in similar computational tasks, albeit on different problems?
With the current system of science in America, I don’t see any mechanism to reduce the rigidity of it. I think it’s a hell of a pity, because more good science and more useful science could be done if there was less rigidity. Over the 15 years or so that I’ve been doing science in America, Read more
March 1, 1993
From: Interview by Paul Wellin, Mathematica in Education
What is the breakdown of educational vs. research users of Mathematica?
That’s a bit of a difficult question to answer. Because when you have a class that uses Mathematica, how do you count the individual students that are going through there? I think that about 40% of the number of copies of Mathematica that are out there are in the educational sector. Read more
March 1, 1993
From: Interview by Paul Wellin, Mathematica in Education
I noticed a rather long debate on the nets recently about the current “role” of Mathematica. Some people were arguing that presentation features should not be focused on—that all work should go into algorithm improvement. I am sure that a similar argument could be put forth about the Mathematica language itself as well. What is your view of its present role?
In terms of algorithm development, I am really very satisfied with the point we’re at and the rate at which things are progressing. My big test for these things in terms of, for example, algebraic algorithms is to be able to clearly say that if there is an integral you can think about doing, Read more
March 1, 1993
From: Interview by Paul Wellin, Mathematica in Education
From an educational point of view, would you put the Mathematica language on a par with Fortran or Pascal?
People might attack me for immodesty, but I think in the present day and age, if you’re teaching general people about programming computers, Mathematica is far and away the best programming language to use—and I’ll tell you why. There are a certain set of people, who when they are grown up, Read more
March 3, 1993
From: Interview by Paul Wellin, Mathematica in Education
You went to Oxford for college, but never finished there—so what led from there to Caltech?
I was pretty much on the track of doing particle physics research, and being a physics undergraduate at Oxford wasn’t a particularly useful environment in which to do particle physics research. Since I had the opportunity fairly easily to go to graduate school in the US, I decided to do that and I chose to go to Caltech. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
The reception of the Mathematica system in the mathematical community has on occasion raised unexpectedly high feelings, and has sometimes appeared to take on the dimensions of a zealot’s war of disparagement against hype. Do you have an explanation for this fairly unique occurrence? What is your view of the matter?
I’m not quite sure what you mean. Any successful enterprise will have its detractors—that’s just the way the world works. I guess mathematicians can sometimes get a little more righteously out of control than other folk—witness the Unabomber. But I think that considering the level of success we’ve had, there have been surprisingly few detractors—even in mathematics.
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
What is your most important long-term plan for Mathematica?
Well, I’m not sure how long term you mean. I’m sure Mathematica will still be being developed when I’m an old man. The core will be the same, but there’ll be lots of new stuff made possible by new computer technology, new mathematics and so on. My plan with our company is to keep doing what we’ve been doing for 10 years already—trying to push the state of the art, Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
You have been working on a book about science for some time. Can you sketch some of your ideas? Are there implications for symbolic computation and symbolic computation systems?
Well, that’s a whole other discussion. What I’m trying to do is a pretty big thing: I’m trying to build a whole new way of thinking about science. If you look at most of science for the past three hundred or so years, there’s been a common theme all the way through: that nature should be somehow or another be described by mathematical equations. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Chicago Software Newspaper
You’ve spent a lot of time in business and working in pure science areas. Do you prefer one environment to the other or have any observations on the two worlds?
There is science, and then there is academia. When I was a professor I used to say that business was my hobby and being a professor was what I made money at. Now I say that if one wants to do basic research and you have no other choice—go be a professor. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Chicago Software Newspaper
Was the MacArthur Fellowship grant what enabled you to start Wolfram Research?
No, that wasn’t really enough. I made some money from the previous company and I made money doing consulting work too. Also, the costs of launching a software company aren’t that great. I tell people that if a software company costs more than a million dollars to launch you are doing something wrong. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Chicago Software Newspaper
Do you have any outside investors?
One of the things we have done that is somewhat unusual for a software company is avoid venture capital and going public. Many companies seek venture capital and then work to puff up the company for four or five years so they can go to the market…. My company has been built up as a stable, Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
What has been in your view the most important effect of Mathematica since its release?
Basically that we’ve defined a whole new way for people to use computers—and that more than a million people have found out that it’s a good idea. For your audience, I’d say the most important thing is that lots and lots of people from all sorts of fields have now been exposed through Mathematica to issues about computers and mathematics—and have started to care about them. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
Where has Mathematica not met your expectations?
Technically I think Mathematica is great. I’m always thinking of more things to make it do, but I’m very happy with what’s there. One thing I guess I’m slightly disappointed about is that we don’t seem to have managed to communicate some of the intellectual advances in Mathematica as thoroughly as I’d like to people in areas like computer science and mathematics. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
With the benefit of hindsight, is there anything you would have developed differently in Mathematica?
Surprisingly little, actually. Of course it’s very scary when one makes a system that lots of people use: one has to get things right the first time—one can’t go back later and make incompatible changes. But eight years on I’m actually very pleased with how few things I would have done differently. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
Symbolic computation as a research discipline has an uneasy existence between mathematics and computer science. Will this change? What can be done to change it?
Gosh, I’m not sure exactly what you mean. I’m not a great fan of a lot of academic work that goes on these days. I think a lot of areas of academia have become incredibly introverted: people just write papers that other people in their fields will read. They don’t seem to care much about anything outside. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
Some observers see a research crisis in mathematical computation—a dearth of both fundamental and practical advances; others are concerned about a looming funding crisis. How do you see the situation?
Well, I think Wolfram Research has one of the largest—if not the largest—R&D efforts in mathematical computation anywhere. And certainly I’m pretty happy with the stuff we’re getting done—which ends up being both practical and fundamental. I don’t know so much about the academic mathematical computation scene. But I’m a bit surprised you ask about funding. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
In what areas of mathematics do you see an underdeveloped potential for computational methods? What could be done to encourage developments?
I think the opportunities of computer experiments are absolutely vast. It’s like the situation about three hundred years ago with physics experiments. Even the easy stuff hasn’t been done. I’ve spent some of the past 15 years trying to do a bunch of the easy computer experiments—and I’ve discovered some incredibly interesting things. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
One paradigm currently attracting interest is knowledge-based symbolic algorithms and computing. Do you see potential for this approach?
I’m afraid I don’t know what “knowledge-based symbolic algorithms” are. If that means programs with tables in, then yes, those are useful—especially when one has the pattern-matching capabilities of Mathematica. I wish academic computer scientists would use less jargon! It really gets fairly funny when people like me build big computer science systems but can’t remember the official names of the things they’re doing!
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
One discernible computational trend in networking is remote software: do you see consequences for symbolic computation systems?
MathLink has always been runnable over a network, and an increasing number of people are doing it. The advantages are mainly practical, but they’re significant.
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
Will parallelism—and systems which support it—be a decisive issue?
Not in the near future, I think. As you perhaps know, I was quite involved with massively parallel computing 10 or 15 years ago. As you also know, the marketplace for parallel computing never really happened. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. The traditional general-purpose design of processors has too much market momentum behind it. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
Do you believe that any further major general-purpose symbolic computation systems could be successfully launched in the future?
You mean Mathematica competitors? It depends what you mean by “major”. If we don’t do anything really stupid, I think it’s unlikely anyone else will reach a million users in the foreseeable future. But the more successful we are, the more there’ll be people who’ll want to claim that they’re building systems that are like ours. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
One sees a multiplication of smaller specialized systems whose design is also increasingly sophisticated. What balance and relationship do you see in the future between specialized and comprehensive systems?
I guess the specialized systems that seem to me to make the most sense are the ones built in Mathematica. They start from all the stuff we’ve done, then add specialized abilities. I don’t know why there are so many people building specialized systems in languages like C. I guess it may conceivably make for a better story for an academic paper—though I’m not quite sure why—but I don’t think it’s a good use of effort. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
One strange aspect of symbolic computation is that the production of mathematical software is an almost invisible, unrecorded discipline. Do you have an explanation for this?
That’s true in almost any field that involves actually building things. We’ve always been very happy for software historians to come in and study our efforts. But almost nobody’s ever done it. And we ourselves are more interested in developing new technology than in writing academic papers and things about technology we’ve already developed.
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
The community has proponents of “free” software. Increasing numbers of researchers and better software engineering might make public domain systems increasingly serious contenders. What future do you see for the roles of free and commercial software?
Free software is fine when it doesn’t cost much to develop and support. But you can’t expect to have a really vital long-term product and make it free. What we see a lot with Mathematica packages is that the first versions are free: they’re made by one or two people at a university or some such. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
The use of symbolic computational tools in teaching is a controversial topic where transatlantic differences are particularly evident; what is your view on the matter?
I guess the use of calculators is controversial too. I think anything that’s new will be controversial, and will remain so until the people who didn’t grow up with it die off. I think it’s fairly obvious that having a tool available is better than not having it available. And certainly it looks to me as if some rather nice things have been done with Mathematica—and particularly with Mathematica notebooks—in the courseware area.
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
Lisp was built on the tradition of the lambda calculus. When Prolog became popular a good dozen years ago, it also spawned a flurry of research into the semantics of logic programming. The evaluation model of Mathematica as a programming language is at least as complex and interesting: why has there been no comparable interest?
I’ve wondered that myself. There has been some work, but there could certainly be much more. Perhaps it’s another sign of the decay of academic computer science. After all, thinking about evaluation models is intellectually quite difficult, especially when there’s a real system out there to stop people being able to hide in pure formalism. Read more
September 30, 1996
From: Interview by Robers Lee Hotz, Los Angeles Times
What is more important to you—the technical elegance of the Mathematica program or the financial rewards it brings?
In the world of high-tech industry, the money becomes the main point for a lot of people. Take your company, puff it up a bit, take it public, cash out, retire. And then what? I have kept my company private and intend to continue doing that because what I am really interested in is the long-term intellectual achievement that our product represents. Read more
September 30, 1996
From: Interview by Robers Lee Hotz, Los Angeles Times
You started your design of Mathematica where most software developers end theirs—by writing a 1,395-page users’ manual. Why?
If you can’t explain it honestly in the manual, then you are probably making a mistake in the way it is designed and people will never be able to understand how it is ever going to work.
One of the things I found to be the most intellectually demanding in building big systems like Mathematica is this whole thing of starting from nothing and then having to build some kind of language and some kind of structure that a lot of people are going to live inside. Read more
September 30, 1996
From: Interview by Robers Lee Hotz, Los Angeles Times
How do you balance the demands of a software developer with a commitment to serious scientific work?
One has to be fairly efficient and organized. It has been my personal practice that I work fairly late at night, by which time the company has closed down. Everything is very quiet, and I am able to concentrate on a solitary activity. It is a strange contrast.
In dealing with a company, Read more
September 30, 1996
From: Interview by Robers Lee Hotz, Los Angeles Times
You went from Caltech to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies to the University of Illinois, and now you are on your own. Is it easier outside the university?
My view about doing basic science is that if you have no choice, then getting paid by a university is a fine thing to do. If you have a choice, there are a lot better ways to live.
In my life now, where I am a CEO of a company, the actual fraction of my time that I can get to devote to basic science thinking is probably much larger than the fraction of time that a typical senior professor at a university would get to devote to actual basic research. Read more
September 30, 1996
From: Interview by Robers Lee Hotz, Los Angeles Times
From your experience, can the academic culture support high-tech entrepreneurs?
Well, they can avoid trying to squash entrepreneurial activities. Ten or 15 years ago, when I was at Caltech, for example, the idea of commercial stuff going on in an academic setting was viewed as completely horrifying.
Universities in some cases provide the way to get the R&D for a product done fairly cheaply, Read more
September 30, 1996
From: Interview by Robers Lee Hotz, Los Angeles Times
Over the years, you always have been unusually careful to spell out your rights to any intellectual property. How important are patents and copyrights?
One of the things that people often forget about intellectual property and its ownership is that the formal pieces of paper that describe the ownership of a piece of intellectual property are a small part of the battle in terms of having it turn into something valuable.
So many times I have seen people who say they have this very clever idea and who want to patent it and who think they are going to get rich from the patent. Read more
September 30, 1996
From: Interview by Robers Lee Hotz, Los Angeles Times
What would you consider your most serious mistake running Wolfram Research?
Part of our market is selling to universities—maybe 25% of our revenues. When Mathematica first came out, academics were used to the idea that any software they cared about was free—at least to them.
I thought there was a serious market for Mathematica in the academic market. We had to dig in our heels and say this is going to cost you real money. Read more
October 30, 1996
From: Interview by Nick Turner, Investor's Business Daily
What’s the market for technical computing?
The kinds of people who need to calculate things span a surprisingly large range. And that range is an ever-increasing one. It started off with scientists and engineers. Now, it includes financial analysts, people in medical research, social sciences and life sciences. A lot of students also use it—from graduate school down to high school. Read more
February 6, 1998
From: Interview by David Stork, Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality
If I calculated correctly, 2001: A Space Odyssey must have come out when you were nine years old. Did you see it then?
Definitely. In fact, it was my favorite movie, and I ended up seeing it quite a few times.
February 6, 1998
From: Interview by David Stork, Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality
What was it that you liked about 2001: A Space Odyssey?
All the technology. It had such a rich rendering of technology. So bright and attractive. I followed the US space program quite a bit in those days, but I was always disappointed when I realized that the inside of a spacecraft was just the size of a closet. In 2001 there were masses of technology, Read more
February 6, 1998
From: Interview by David Stork, Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality
Did you identify with any of the characters in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Not really. At the time, I was young, and they all seemed quite old, and very American. Growing up in England, all that “Roger your plan to go EVA” stuff seemed pretty foreign to me. I guess I didn’t ever imagine talking jargon like that. One thing, though, was that I definitely was very interested in one day being able to interact with the kind of technology that was in the movie. Read more
February 6, 1998
From: Interview by David Stork, Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality
What struck you most about 2001: A Space Odyssey watching it now, in your adulthood?
Well, it seemed a lot shorter than when I was a kid. It also seemed to make a lot more sense. I guess I now at least think I understand how all the pieces are supposed to fit together. And they really raise some very interesting questions. But let’s talk about that later. Read more
February 6, 1998
From: Interview by David Stork, Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality
A lot of things haven’t worked out exactly as 2001: A Space Odyssey predicted. Does that surprise you?
Well, given the level of detail in the movie, it’s an absolute setup to be proved wrong. I’ve got to say that I’m really impressed by how much was got right. And I think a lot of the mistakes are really interesting mistakes—mistakes that one learns something by seeing why they were made. Read more
February 6, 1998
From: Interview by David Stork, Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality
What did you think about the computers in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Well, let’s talk about the ordinary ones—not HAL—for now. It’s really fascinating what was predicted correctly there, and what wasn’t. There was one definite major conceptual mistake, I think, that had to do with misassessing the power of software, and that pervaded a lot of the things that weren’t got right. Read more
February 6, 1998
From: Interview by David Stork, Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality
What kind of thing would make us sure we had detected extraterrestrial intelligence? What about receiving the digits of pi?
Well, that’s a tough one, for two reasons. First, how would we know that there was a complicated intentional intelligence generating those digits? You see, I’ve found some very simple systems that generate things like the digits of pi. Systems so simple that we could easily imagine they’d occur naturally, without intentional intelligence. Read more
February 6, 1998
From: Interview by David Stork, Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality
Do you think there is extraterrestrial intelligence out there?
Oh, I’m sure there are lots and lots of systems that can do computations as sophisticated as working out the digits of pi. We’ve got lots right here on Earth. But we don’t call them intelligent. Even though some of them seem to “have a mind of their own”—like the weather. Read more
February 6, 1998
From: Interview by David Stork, Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality
Will we find extraterrestrial intelligence?
I expect so. And probably eventually the argument about whether the signals we get from them are really “natural” or “artificial” will die down. But my guess is that history will work out so that we build artificial intelligence in computers before we find extraterrestrial intelligence. And the result of that is that finding extraterrestrial intelligence will be considerably less dramatic to us. Read more
featured
February 6, 1998
From: Interview by David Stork, Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality
Do you really think that we can get a handle on profoundly hard, high-level problems of AI—such as my favorite, scene analysis—by looking at something as “simple” as cellular automata?
Definitely. But it takes quite a shift in intuition to see how. In a sense it’s about whether one’s dealing with engineering problems or with science problems. You see, in engineering, we’re always used to setting things up so we can explicitly foresee how everything will work. And that’s a very limiting thing. Read more
February 6, 1998
From: Interview by David Stork, Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality
Have you yourself worked much on the problem of building intelligent machines?
Well, since you ask, I’ll tell you the answer is yes. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it in public before. But since you asked the right question: yes, I have been interested in the problem for a very long time—probably 20 years now—and have been steadily picking away at it. Read more
July 7, 2002
From: Interview by Loch Adamson, The New York Times
After A New Kind of Science, do you have a follow-up project planned?
I’ve been meaning to take a vacation for years, but I think I’m actually about to enter a tool-building phase again. I see a number of directions from the science that I’ve done, and one that I like rather a lot is approaches to fundamental physics, sort of trying to find a final, Read more
July 7, 2002
From: Interview by Loch Adamson, The New York Times
You were a child prodigy. Was that a burden?
I consider myself a very peculiar case of the child-prodigy phenomenon. I was fortunate enough to go through educational tracks that included lots of other smart kids. I suppose if somebody had asked me when I was a teenager writing particle-physics papers, do I think that there are a lot of other teenagers doing the same thing, Read more
July 7, 2002
From: Interview by Loch Adamson, The New York Times
Is it hard for you to look to a larger audience for the future of A New Kind of Science, to think of its having iterations you can’t control, as if it were a program itself?
I have to admit that I have some misgivings about taking the things that I find—these beautiful facts—and putting them out there into the world. What is always disappointing for a person like me is that one has gone to a lot of effort to explain what one has done, and then people start trying to take steps beyond that, Read more
July 7, 2002
From: Interview by Loch Adamson, The New York Times
What kinds of scientific contributions might come about in response to your book? And when do you think we might see them?
I’m probably more nervous about people trying to apply what I’ve done in the book too quickly, rather than too slowly. It would be bizarre if my attempts to sort of change the direction of quite a bit of science were, you know, immediately absorbed and understood by people who had spent decades working in some different direction. Read more
August 6, 2002
From: Interview by Mary Kathleen Flynn, PC Magazine
Why has your book A New Kind of Science caused controversy?
It’s a classic paradigm-shift situation. Part of what made it take 20 years for me to figure out what I say in the book is that I had to get over all the preconceptions I had from doing traditional science. I’d feel really silly if, in just a few weeks, everyone could absorb everything I’ve done.
August 6, 2002
From: Interview by Mary Kathleen Flynn, PC Magazine
Why do programs offer a better way to model nature than equations?
Traditional equations involve just the rather specific kinds of rules that are built into ordinary human mathematics. But programs can involve much more general kinds of rules. It is those more general rules that nature seems to be using a lot of the time.
The crucial discovery from the 1930s is that it’s possible to make universal systems that can compute anything, Read more
April 7, 2003
From: Interview by The Scientist Magazine
Why haven’t you read all the reviews of A New Kind of Science?
There are a lot of them, and they’re not all that interesting.
April 7, 2003
From: Interview by The Scientist Magazine
How has A New Kind of Science’s reception been from biologists in general?
Rather enthusiastic. I think there’s a tremendous awareness in that community that the next big steps have to involve theoretical modeling, and trying to understand global mechanisms. Questions about evolution theory often loom large in public discussions of biology. But a much greater interest among practicing biologists is to take what I’ve done and use it as a framework for new basic models and theories. Read more
April 7, 2003
From: Interview by The Scientist Magazine
Do you get bored easily?
I tend not to do things I find boring… If I think the things I’m doing are pointless, I try to stop doing them as quickly as possible. Figuring out new things is what I like doing most.
April 7, 2003
From: Interview by The Scientist Magazine
What did you do for fun as a child?
When I was a kid, the thing that I was interested in was science. In doing science, if I wanted to get to the local university library, I had to bicycle. I suppose the bicycling was a more traditional kid thing to do.
April 7, 2003
From: Interview by The Scientist Magazine
Has having children changed how you think about life, about science, about yourself?
I’m lucky enough to have children who are interested in understanding all sorts of things, and it’s certainly been fascinating to figure out how to explain science and business and so on to them. They’ve taught me a lot.
April 7, 2003
From: Interview by The Scientist Magazine
Are you modest?
Different people have different opinions on that. It’s hard to see from the inside. Certainly I am a person who values truth over modesty. For example, in my book I chose to talk quite explicitly about the importance of some of my ideas and discoveries, because without that, it would be much more difficult for people to get a correct handle on where these fit in. Read more
May 9, 2003
From: Interview by John Russell, Bio-ITWorld
Why did you self-publish A New Kind of Science? Why not present your ideas in a peer-reviewed journal, where they could be assessed by other scientists?
Well, you just need to go to Amazon.com to see a lot of comments on the book. Most of them are bull____. This is too big a thing to propagate through the standard mechanism of science. As a person who’s published a journal for the last 17 years (Complex Systems), Read more
May 9, 2003
From: Interview by John Russell, Bio-ITWorld
How will A New Kind of Science be applied to solving biological problems?
The basic thing is, we know what the genome looks like. Now the question is, “How do we go from that to what cells and organisms actually do?” And that question is really, “What methodology might we imagine [for doing] that?” Many theories in science [have] been based on the idea “let’s make a mathematical equation that describes the question”. Read more
May 9, 2003
From: Interview by John Russell, Bio-ITWorld
Who is looking for primitives to use to describe biological systems, and how long will it take before we see tools that are based on them?
Not long at all. There are people working on it right now. You can just search in the space of all possible simple programs because there just aren’t that many of them. There might be a trillion of them. It’s not hard to search a space of a trillion simple programs. Read more
May 9, 2003
From: Interview by John Russell, Bio-ITWorld
You’ve said the conventional idea of natural selection is wrong. What do you mean?
People have tended to think there can’t be a predictive theory of biology because they say, “Well it’s all governed by natural selection and adaptation. You know, the way we are today is due to some accident that happened to some trilobite 200 million years ago”.
But I don’t think that. Read more
May 9, 2003
From: Interview by John Russell, Bio-ITWorld
One unsettling aspect of NKS is computational irreducibility—the idea that you can’t predict what will happen with a program. Can you define what you mean?
Well, [let’s say] you want to predict where Earth is going to be a million years from now. We don’t have to follow each orbit a million times. We just have to plug a number into a formula, and immediately we can work out where Earth will be in a million years from now. Read more
May 9, 2003
From: Interview by John Russell, Bio-ITWorld
Most of the examples in A New Kind of Science look at things easily represented by images, such as leaf patterns. Can NKS be used to model other tasks, such as biochemical pathways?
The things I’ve studied in great detail are large-scale morphological features like, for example, shapes of leaves. So when it comes to looking up mollusc pigmentation, I look at a pattern and it’s very easy to see what class of programs [are appropriate]. It turns out you can also look at networks with simple programs. Read more
May 9, 2003
From: Interview by John Russell, Bio-ITWorld
Are there problem areas in which the ideas and techniques of NKS are not applicable?
Who knows? It’s hard to answer that question until you’ve tried them all.
April 9, 2005
From: Interview by Andres Hax, Clarín
Is it correct to say that with your discoveries regarding the behavior of cellular automata, you are introducing a paradigm shift in the sciences on par with Darwin?
If there’s an analogy, it’s probably this. Darwin went on voyages around the world and saw all sorts of remarkable biological phenomena—that led him to a new paradigm. I’ve taken a lot of abstract voyages in the computational world, and have seen all sorts of remarkable phenomena there—that have led me to a new paradigm, Read more
April 9, 2005
From: Interview by Andres Hax, Clarín
How long will it take for your ideas from A New Kind of Science to become accepted/commonplace?
It’s inevitably a gradual process. But I think it’s off to a very good start. Right now, for example, there’s an average of one or two academic papers per day involving NKS being written. I’m sure that in a decade there’ll be lots of people who have built their careers on NKS, Read more
April 9, 2005
From: Interview by Andres Hax, Clarín
One of the most stunning aspects of A New Kind of Science—at least for a layman—is the absence of mathematics. In the long term, will your discoveries make mathematics an obsolete tool for scientific inquiry?
Two things are already happening. First, there’s a new kind of basic science emerging—“pure NKS”. It’s like a physics, or a chemistry, or a mathematics, but concerned with systems in the computational world. Second, ideas and results from pure NKS are getting applied to lots of other places. Some of them aren’t science at all. Read more
April 9, 2005
From: Interview by Andres Hax, Clarín
Has this idea of computational irreducibility changed the way you view your existence? Is this idea as menacing to historical faith traditions as Darwin’s theory of evolution?
I do think that the history of the universe—and everything in it—is completely determined. But the point about computational irreducibility is that it shows that that doesn’t mean it has to be dull. Even though it’s determined, it can still be unpredictable and surprising. And it’s irreducible—so we actually have to live it in order to see what happens. Read more
April 9, 2005
From: Interview by Andres Hax, Clarín
Ray Kurzweil says of class 4 automata, “… they do not continue to evolve into anything more complex, nor do they develop new types of features… They do not evolve into, say, insects or humans, or Chopin preludes…”. Is this a damaging critique of the Principle of Computational Equivalence?
Class 4 cellular automata can actually make surprisingly good music! It takes doing a lot of actual experiments to get a good intuition for systems like cellular automata. One of the things I’ve always found is that whenever I think “they can’t do X”, I’m always wrong. It’s just that I can’t imagine how they do “X”. Read more
April 9, 2005
From: Interview by Andres Hax, Clarín
How do you see the future of the human race? Will the implications of the Principle of Computational Equivalence, if recognized and adopted, alter the evolution of the human race? If so, how and how soon?
There’s going to be more and more coupling between computers and humans. More and more of our activities—including cognitive ones—will be successfully “outsourced” to computers. Then there’ll be questions about what’s essentially different between computers and humans. And the Principle of Computational Equivalence says there will never be anything fundamentally different. Read more
April 9, 2005
From: Interview by Andres Hax, Clarín
What is the relation of your Principle of Computational Equivalence with chaos and complexity theory?
Chaos theory is really about a very specific phenomenon: that sensitive dependence on initial conditions can lead to randomness. And what one finds in the end is that the only way to get randomness out of this phenomenon is just to put randomness in, in the initial conditions. What I’ve found is that simple programs can actually produce randomness—and complexity—without it ever being put in. Read more
April 9, 2005
From: Interview by Andres Hax, Clarín
Of the various areas of scientific inquiry, which do you think will be first to radically change due to your new kind of science, and how will it change?
Two things are already happening. First, there’s a new kind of basic science emerging—“pure NKS”. It’s like a physics, or a chemistry, or a mathematics, but concerned with systems in the computational world. Second, ideas and results from pure NKS are getting applied to lots of other places. Some of them aren’t science at all. Read more
April 9, 2005
From: Interview by Andres Hax, Clarín
When did you decide to put A New Kind of Science on your website? How important will the internet be for introducing NKS into the global intellectual community?
I’d planned to put the book on the web, though representing its visual elements there is still a challenge. One thing that’s great about NKS is that once you understand it, all you need to do it is a computer. So that immediately allows it to be a very global enterprise. Read more
July 1, 2008
From: Interview by Luciano Floridi, Philosophy of Computing and Information: 5 Questions
Why were you initially drawn to computational and/or informational issues?
At first, it was a very practical thing. I always believe in using the best tools. And in the early 1970s (when I was an early teenager), I happened to get interested in physics. And I realized that the best way to figure out some things I wanted to figure out in physics was to use a computer. Read more
July 1, 2008
From: Interview by Luciano Floridi, Philosophy of Computing and Information: 5 Questions
What example(s) from your work (or the work of others) best illustrates the fruitful use of a computational and/or informational approach for foundational researches and/or applications?
I’ve now spent about 25 years applying computational ideas to questions in basic science. The single most fruitful concept has been exploring the computational universe of possible programs.
The exact sciences have always tended to use a fairly small set of models, mostly based on traditional mathematics. A key new concept from computation is to enumerate all possible programs—and potentially use them as models. Read more
July 1, 2008
From: Interview by Luciano Floridi, Philosophy of Computing and Information: 5 Questions
What is the proper role of computer science and/or information science in relation to other disciplines?
Every discipline will inevitably become “computational”—and its methods and practice will become deeply infused with computation. I happen to have seen this personally over the past two decades as Mathematica and the computational capabilities it brings have spread through more and more fields.
Computation is crucial both to doing better what has been done before in other disciplines, Read more
July 1, 2008
From: Interview by Luciano Floridi, Philosophy of Computing and Information: 5 Questions
What do you consider the most neglected topics and/or contributions in late 20th-century studies of computation and/or information?
Computer and information science have tended to define themselves in a rather engineering-based way—concentrating on creating and studying systems that perform particular specified tasks.
But there’s a whole different approach that’s much closer to natural science: to just investigate the computational universe of possible programs, and see what’s out there.
One might have thought that most programs that one would encounter this way would not do anything very interesting. Read more
July 1, 2008
From: Interview by Luciano Floridi, Philosophy of Computing and Information: 5 Questions
What are the most important open problems concerning computation and/or information, and what are the prospects for progress?
There’s a lot still to discover about the computational universe. It’s like many past explorations&mdash’whether of the flora and fauna of Earth, of the chemicals that can be created or of the diversity of astronomical objects. We’ve learned enough to be able to do some basic classification, and we’ve been able to guess at some general principles. Read more
November 12, 2008
From: Interview by Carlos Gershenson, Complexity: 5 Questions
Why did you begin working with complex systems?
It’s a slightly complex story. I started working in physics when I was an early teenager. Mostly I worked on particle physics, but I also thought a lot about the foundations of thermodynamics and statistical physics. And around 1978 I got very interested in the question of how complex structure arises in the universe—from galaxies on down. Read more
November 12, 2008
From: Interview by Carlos Gershenson, Complexity: 5 Questions
How would you define complexity?
Formal definitions can get all tied up in knots—just like formal definitions of almost anything fundamental: life, energy, mathematics, etc. But the intuitive notion is fairly clear: things seem complex if we don’t have a simple way to describe them.
The remarkable scientific fact is that there may be a simple underlying rule for something—even though the thing itself seems to us complex. Read more
November 12, 2008
From: Interview by Carlos Gershenson, Complexity: 5 Questions
What is your favorite aspect/concept of complexity?
That it’s so easy to find in the computational universe.
One used to think that to make something complex, one would have to go to a lot of trouble. That one would have to come up with all sorts of complicated rules, and so on. But what we’ve found by just sampling the universe of simple programs is that nothing like that is the case. Read more
November 12, 2008
From: Interview by Carlos Gershenson, Complexity: 5 Questions
In your opinion, what is the most problematic aspect/concept of complexity?
In the early 1980s I was very excited about what I’d discovered about the origins of complexity, and I realized there was a whole “science of complexity” that could be built. I made quite an effort to promote “complex systems research” (I would have immediately called it “complexity theory”, but wanted to avoid the field of theoretical computer science that was then using that name). Read more
November 12, 2008
From: Interview by Carlos Gershenson, Complexity: 5 Questions
How do you see the future of complexity (including obstacles, dangers, promises and relations with other areas)?
It’s already underway… but in the years and decades to come we’re going to see a fundamental change in the approach to both science and technology. We’re going to see much simpler underlying systems and rules, with much more complex behavior, all over the place.
Sometimes we’re going to see “off-the-shelf” Read more
May 29, 2009
From: Interview by Monica Attard, ABC Local
Is Wolfram|Alpha another Google, a simple search engine? Or is it like a vast encyclopedia of sorts?
When you look up a term in the encyclopedia, you still have to go and read the paragraph about that term and you have to make sort of your own conclusions from the narrative text that’s written there.
The idea of Wolfram|Alpha is you have a specific question, you know: where will the Sun be at, Read more
May 29, 2009
From: Interview by Monica Attard, ABC Local
How important is it to you to identify sources on Wolfram|Alpha?
Well, I think our approach as you’re alluding to, it’s rather different from a search engine. A search engine is just saying, look we as the search engine, we’re not making any judgments about any of this information—we’re just giving you… you know, here are 10 links that you can go read and make your own judgment about them. Read more
May 29, 2009
From: Interview by Monica Attard, ABC Local
How do you access all those repositories of knowledge that you use in Wolfram|Alpha?
It’s been lots of work. I mean we had a foundation which was, in terms of the algorithmic side of things, had a system called Mathematica which we’ve been building and selling out there in the world for 23 years now. And that’s the platform from which Wolfram|Alpha is built.
In terms of the actual raw data about the real world, Read more
May 29, 2009
From: Interview by Monica Attard, ABC Local
Google is planning to launch a similar service to Wolfram|Alpha called Google Squared. Do you see it as similar?
I don’t really know enough about it. I mean, I think that what we’ve been doing here is a much more insanely ambitious project than I think anybody else really could seriously imagine at this point. I don’t really know about the details, but the general search engine concept tends to be you’re foraging information from the web and kind of using some purely automated algorithm to present that foraged information in some useful way. Read more
May 29, 2009
From: Interview by Monica Attard, ABC Local
What do your children make of what you do?
Well, at least three of them are quite avid users [of the Wolfram Language], and in the development of Wolfram|Alpha they’ve been mightily amused by many of the bugs. One of them was particularly taken with the moment where if you typed in “elephant”, it wasn’t talking about the species, it somehow got confused about a thing called Elephant Island that’s somewhere near Antarctica. Read more
August 31, 2009
From: Interview by Kaustubh Katdare, CrazyEngineers
Could you give a brief overview of the algorithms that make Wolfram|Alpha work and produce great results?
It’s a big system! These days about 6 million lines of Mathematica code. It relies on a very large number of different algorithms and methods, a large fraction of which we’ve had to invent. In a sense it’s NKS that makes it possible: the paradigmatic idea that there can be fairly simple underlying programs that produce the rich and complex behavior we need. Read more
August 31, 2009
From: Interview by Kaustubh Katdare, CrazyEngineers
Where does Wolfram|Alpha get all its data? Does it crawl the Internet like web search engines?
We try to get data from the most definitive, authoritative, sources. Often the web is a good place to start in helping us identify those sources. But then we tend to go to them directly. Identifying the best sources is just the first step, though. Then we have to curate the data, Read more
August 31, 2009
From: Interview by Kaustubh Katdare, CrazyEngineers
Are the new rules of logic upon which computation can be based, radically different from conventional logic? Alternatively, is it an extension of conventional logic + something else?
Computation is ultimately about following rules—of any kind. Traditional logic represents just one class of rules. There are lots of others that can be used. One of the surprising discoveries from NKS is just how easy it is to find rules that can support universal computation. And that’s important if one wants to base computation on elements like molecules. Read more
August 31, 2009
From: Interview by Kaustubh Katdare, CrazyEngineers
How do you think dependence on computers will affect us in the future?
Throughout human history, progress has tended to be about automating more and more things, so we as humans don’t have to do them ourselves. Computers are an important new step in this direction. So far we’ve only seen the very beginning of what they’ll let us do. Broad access to computable knowledge is going to be pretty important. Read more
August 31, 2009
From: Interview by Kaustubh Katdare, CrazyEngineers
What are your expectations from today’s scientists and engineers?
Make sure you always know the best tools. Keep learning. Don’t get stuck in some particular niche. The most exciting things are usually happening at the boundaries, where you need to know about several different kinds of things.
August 31, 2009
From: Interview by Kaustubh Katdare, CrazyEngineers
What discoveries have you made about the origins of complexity?
I started exploring the computational universe, looking at what very simple computer programs do. One might have thought that simple programs would always just do simple things. But to my great surprise, my computer experiments showed that that isn’t the case. Out in the computational universe, it’s easy to get complexity. Read more
August 31, 2009
From: Interview by Kaustubh Katdare, CrazyEngineers
What kind of problems can we attempt to solve in the future using Mathematica?
Anything that can be made computational! There’s a huge knowledgebase of algorithms and data now in Mathematica. And the symbolic programming paradigm that underlies Mathematica has turned out to be incredibly general and powerful. It’s really fun for me to see how incredibly productive people who know Mathematica well can be. Read more
August 31, 2009
From: Interview by Kaustubh Katdare, CrazyEngineers
How did you go about building Wolfram|Alpha? What were the design challenges and architecture of Wolfram|Alpha?
It’s a complicated project. Certainly it has many more “moving parts” than anything I’ve ever tried to do before. There’s the data side of it: building a pipeline to organize and expertly curate data from all different domains. Then there’s implementing all the methods and models that we know from science and other fields. Read more
August 31, 2009
From: Interview by Kaustubh Katdare, CrazyEngineers
What kind of infrastructure do you have to process all the data in Wolfram|Alpha?
We have several supercomputer-class clusters running Wolfram|Alpha. All of the code of Wolfram|Alpha is written in Mathematica. When you give an input, it gets handled by webMathematica, then parallelized through a version of gridMathematica.
January 5, 2010
From: Interview by Gregory T. Huang, Xconomy
What are your tips for managing a company remotely?
My theory is the most productive form of meeting is conference calls with Web conferencing. You can have more people in the meeting, and you’re not wasting anyone’s time. They can work on other things, and if you need them, you just say their name. I’ve found that it’s what I spend my life doing. Read more
January 5, 2010
From: Interview by Gregory T. Huang, Xconomy
From a technology standpoint, what’s next for Wolfram|Alpha?
In Wolfram|Alpha, a lot of what it works out is “old science” based. There is an existing model for such and such economic process [for example]. These models are based on equations and mathematical kinds of things. But can we not only compute on the fly, can we also invent and create on the fly? Read more
January 5, 2010
From: Interview by Gregory T. Huang, Xconomy
How mainstream will Wolfram|Alpha become, compared with search engines like Google or Bing?
These are complementary kinds of things. It’s like asking, how successful is science going to be in the world? It’s saying, what can you compute in the world? How could search engines become so important? When it becomes sufficiently easy to be a reference librarian hundreds of times a day.
I think the set of people for whom Wolfram|Alpha is useful is very broad. Read more
January 5, 2010
From: Interview by Gregory T. Huang, Xconomy
Are physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) using your computational techniques?
There’s a lot of Mathematica usage. I’d expect LHC people would use [NKS] on their laptops for searching the space of models. It’s for the future of NKS to figure out if something bizarre is seen at LHC.
August 17, 2010
From: Interview by Uses This
What hardware do you use?
The answer changes practically every week. But as of today, here’s the answer.
My current desktop system is a Windows 7 64-bit 8-core machine with two large displays, arranged so they don’t obstruct the nice view out of my office windows. (The machine is in a different room so I don’t have to listen to its noise.) I have a large Linux file server, Read more
August 17, 2010
From: Interview by Uses This
What software do you use?
By far my #1 tool is Mathematica. Which, of course, I built so I could have it to use! These days I use it not just to compute, but also to keep notes, to create presentations, and to do all sorts of other things. Partly, I figure that the more I actually use Mathematica, Read more
August 17, 2010
From: Interview by Uses This
What would be your dream setup?
Mathematica + Wolfram|Alpha everywhere! Laptops that switch on and get connected immediately anywhere. Systems that combine the best of touch with mouse and keyboard. Easy recording, transcribing, archiving and searching of everything. A perfect telepresence system, with half a room where I am, and half somewhere else. I think I also want mobile telepresence, Read more
November 3, 2011
From: Interview by Mark Jannot, Popular Science
Is it possible for nature, writ large—for the universe itself—to ever do anything that is anything other than incremental?
Yes! When you look at different things that happen in different physical systems, you can ask, is it the same case in the way that fluid flow works in this situation versus that situation? They may not be connected. There’s no requirement that the fluid flow be—from one situation to another, Read more
featured
November 3, 2011
From: Interview by Mark Jannot, Popular Science
How simple would you imagine the underlying rule for the universe could be? How many lines of code would you guess, roughly what range?
Here’s a way to think about that. If you start enumerating possible universes, you can—the best representation I’ve found for what I think is a reasonable way to get at this is using networks, transformation rules for networks, so you can represent that as code in Mathematica or something. And each of these transformation rules is probably two, Read more
November 3, 2011
From: Interview by Mark Jannot, Popular Science
Is your theory that if one universe can be generated from simple algorithms, all universes can and have been? Or would be?
The only thing we can meaningfully talk about in science, as far as empirical science is concerned, is our actual universe: there’s only one. Anything else we say about it is a purely theoretical thing. Now, the question would be—we might then say, gosh, what must be happening is that somewhere out there, Read more
November 3, 2011
From: Interview by Mark Jannot, Popular Science
Is it fair to say that the fundamental aim of Wolfram|Alpha is to foster and democratize computational knowledge?
That’s what we’re trying to do. That’s the big effort. That’s the thing: Absent these various realizations, one might have thought that with computational knowledge, we’ll really not be able to get very far; it’s very specialized and won’t be able to be generally useful. And for me, that’s the big metadiscovery of the past two years: that at this time in history, Read more
November 3, 2011
From: Interview by Mark Jannot, Popular Science
The notion that all of our exponential growth curves in data gathering, storage and processing ability have delivered us to a real paradigm-shift moment in terms of how data can both help us to understand our world and to change it. Do you agree with that? And how does that dovetail with your own work with data and computation?
There are several different branches here. Let’s start with, when you say data, what are the sources of data in the world today? One source of data is people compiling data—census data, data on properties of chemicals. This is largely human-compiled data. What has happened today is that there are very large data repositories in lots of different areas. Read more
November 3, 2011
From: Interview by Mark Jannot, Popular Science
Computational irreducibility is like prime numbers in a sense, right? So as long as it has pockets of reducibility, it is not the fundamentally irreducible thing? It’s not the universe that’s computationally irreducible, it’s…?
It’s the processes that go on. OK, so what is the universe? Is the universe the underlying code from which you can generate the universe? Or is it these dynamic processes that are going on inside the universe today? Or is it just one slice of those dynamic processes? This is the universe as it is today, Read more
March 5, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
What got you into mathematics in the first place? What is your favorite piece of mathematics? i.e theorem, proof, fact, construction etc.
Actually, I was first interested in physics… and I learned mathematics as support for that.
I’m not sure if it completely counts as mathematics, but I guess it’s the possibility of universal computation. I think that’s the most important thing that’s been discovered in the past century, and perhaps a lot more.
March 5, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
Was there anything you wish your parents had done differently to make your early education smoother as a child? What about social skills?
I think Wikipedia may overstate the difficulty of my education 🙂
I went to some very good schools in England, and typically did rather well. However, starting from probably age 8 or so, I ended up learning the things I was really interested in outside of school, from books, etc. (I wish the web had existed; Read more
May 12, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
What do you remember most about your time at Eton? Do you have any favorite moments? Least favorite?
I learned all these “useless” subjects, like Latin and Greek… and the bizarre thing is that (a) I still remember most of what I learned, and (b) I’ve actually ended up using a fair fraction of what I learned! (Think: naming products etc.)
I was a “King’s Scholar” at Eton… I think the king in question was Henry VI, Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
If you were to write a Chapter 13 to the NKS book, what would it be about?
Funny you should ask… I had forgotten until recently … but actually I did start writing a “Chapter 13” … though I called it the Epilog. Its title was “The Future of the Science in This Book”.
I looked through it as I was writing my blog post today: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/05/looking-to-the-future-of-a-new-kind-of-science/
And actually … Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
Many students struggle with basic calculus. What is your advice to students who rely on programs like your Wolfram|Alpha engine to get themselves through math courses? Do you think it’s ethical for students to rely on such programs to pass their courses?
I’ve been using computers to do math for more than 30 years now. For me, the important thing is that by using computers I was always able to do many more examples… from which I could get an intuition about how the math should work out. And once one can guess from intuition how a problem should work out, Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
Given that you received your PhD at such a young age compared to many others in your field, what was that experience like in the formative years of your career?
It was great! It was really nice to be “launched” and not to have years of school ahead of me.
It’s a little weird now, because my “contemporaries” 30 years ago were quite a bit older than me… so while I think I’m still in my prime, a lot of my contemporaries are retiring etc.
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
What is your favorite fruit?
You really want to know? 🙂
Actually, right at this moment I have a little tub of raspberries that I am consuming.
I happen to be quite a fruit enthusiast… in fact, every day I end up eating some raspberries, pineapple, strawberries, grapes and usually an apple. (OK, that’s surely more than you wanted to know 🙂 )
And one more thing: I don’t end up going into grocery stores very often (modern times; Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
Can you list some of your favorite books?
I have altogether about 4000 physical books, though I pretty much stopped buying new ones a decade ago. (There’s actually a list of many of my books, as “NKS references” at https://www.wolframscience.com/reference/books/.)
On my desk I have to say I have only one book: A New Kind of Science. Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
What do you recommend for current students who are interested in STEM careers, and want to make a difference?
I’m a huge believer in people doing projects they care about. Learn the basics. Learn the best tools. Then try doing projects. I’m not sure if I’m suitably unbiased in this, but I have to say that I think learning Mathematica is a really good start. It depends on your detailed interests, Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
How much of a hassle was creating Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica?
Hassle? Well, we’ve been working on Mathematica for 25 years, and Wolfram|Alpha for nearly 10. And they’re incredible complicated pieces of technology. But I certainly consider working on them to be a lot of fun…
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
Is there any validity in the talk about the Singularity and Transhumanism?
Transhumanism: yes. Singularity: depends what one means. I don’t think it’s going to be a dramatic moment; more a process.
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
Will we ever formulate the Grand Unified Field Theory, or will it always be a mystery to us?
It’s hard to know for sure… but my guess is that we will find an easy-to-describe theory of physics. It might even happen soon. I’m guessing we have the science and technology needed to do it. Now it’s just a question of deciding it’s possible, and putting all the effort in…
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
What other scientists or researchers, past and present, do you admire most?
Well, one might think this was a very subjective question… but perhaps there’s a way to answer it, at least in part, by pure data mining…
Let’s look at the list of people referenced in the NKS book: https://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/index/names/
Now just count the mentions (with Mathematica of course)… and here are the winners: Alan Turing (19); Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
If somebody proved P=NP, what do you think your reaction would be?
I’d be surprised!
And then I’d ask just what axiom system (Peano arithmetic, set theory,… ?) was used to do it.
I have a suspicion that P?=NP ultimately isn’t a well-defined decidable question. But hopefully we’ll eventually see.
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
If you had to fight a dinosaur to the death in a Dinosaur Death Match using only primitive weapons and not allowed to set traps, what’s the biggest dinosaur you think you win against? You don’t have to name a specific dinosaur, just give us a size reference.
Sadly, I think I would probably lose against anything with serious teeth…
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
Mathematica, NKS, Wolfram|Alpha, what comes next? How are they all related and what is your criteria for choosing a project?
First, lots of combinations of those. There are some really interesting things emerging there.
I’m hoping one day to make a serious assault on finding the fundamental theory of physics. Perhaps that will be my next “very different” project.
How are all my projects connected? Well they all have in common that they involve taking some big hairy area and trying to break it down to find what’s essential, Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
Are you still following/doing current research in physics? Can you summarize in no less than one sentence the “secret” of managing yourself and your resources to do all these projects?
I haven’t done much physics as such in about 4 years; I’ve been “distracted” by Wolfram|Alpha and all the things it makes possible. I’m hoping to get back to it soon, though. I do follow general things in physics, both by reading and by talking to people in the field. And typically I don’t have trouble reading the latest physics papers if I need to. Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
Do you have any sci-fi type ideas that you really think are achievable within your lifetime? Faster-than-light travel, meeting extraterrestrial intelligent life, things of that sort.
Well… some things may actually be impossible… and I even wrote an essay about that a little while ago: https://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/recent/fqxi09/
Some things may happen gradually; others may be the result of a sudden discovery.
I’m guessing “AI” (with some footnotes about what it means) will happen gradually, as will the merger of humans with machines. Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
Have there ever been periods of time where you’ve been burnt out or pessimistic about science and/or the way people react to science, and if so how did you rationalize and overcome those frustrations?
I wrote last week about reactions to the NKS book: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/05/living-a-paradigm-shift-looking-back-on-reactions-to-a-new-kind-of-science/
For years, I’ve tended to do things much more for myself than for the sake of other people’s opinions. Opinions also get pretty statistical after a while: there’ll be people who are very positive, and people who are very negative. Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
How do you see integration of computational thinking into general math education working? Is it something that every student should be exposed to? How deep does the integration go?
My brother Conrad has an initiative related to this, called Computer-Based Math: https://www.computerbasedmath.org/
I think there are also things to do directly with computation and NKS, without any direct connection to traditional “math”. And yes, I think these are great for all students. Both because it’s a foundation for a lot of things in the world. Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
If you were forced to pick a five-year period from history to be sent back to, what period would you pick? Your arrival date will be randomly picked from the five-year period, meaning that you will arrive somewhere in the five-year period. Also this is a one-way trip, and there will be no return to the present. You can only bring with you what you can carry and already have access to, meaning anything you already own or can buy within one hour (budget limited to your current holdings) that you can carry.
Well… I’m not sure how well I’d do before modern candy and other comforts 🙂
I guess I’d want to bring a computer and everything needed to repair it. Not sure I could fit a generator. So it’d have to be some time after electricity…
Heck… this is a weird hypothetical question. Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
What are your thoughts on genetic algorithms? Some researchers are looking into automated research and design, Hod Lipson being a great example. Do you think this idea has a future? Is it even advisable to let inquiry become automated?
I’m definitely interested in “automated discovery”. In fact, we have a bunch of experiments going around Wolfram|Alpha Pro—being able to “tell people something interesting” about whatever data they upload.
My experience with NKS has been that incremental (e.g. genetic) algorithms don’t allow one to find the really surprising results that one can get to with exhaustive search. Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
What’s your favorite NKS rule and why?
Rule 30. I even have it on my business cards 🙂
Because it was when I absorbed what was going on in that rule that I began to understand that there needed to be an NKS… Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
You seem to be fixed on the concept of finite state automata in NKS, why not continuous state systems? Now that we have a greater understanding/respect for emergent phenomena, would you find a place for continuous state automata in your theory?
A fundamental question is whether continuous variables are really things that can concretely exist in our universe, or whether they’re just mathematical abstractions. (Or in the words of Kronecker: “God made the integers; all else is the work of man”.)
My guess is that ultimately the universe is discrete. But even so, Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
You mentioned existence of a model for galaxy formation being in the NKS domain. What other cosmological applications are you aware of in this vein, either published or being pursued?
I worked on cosmology and its relations to particle physics back in the late 1970s, long before that was fashionable… With my friend Rocky Kolb, I even mentioned inflation in a footnote to a paper before it had officially been invented, saying that I thought it was implausible…
There are some really interesting cosmological implications of the kinds of network-based models of physics that I discuss in the NKS book. Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
Do you think intelligence has “normalized”? Basically, with more people alive than ever before and college education available to a large percentage of the world’s population, do you think we are seeing fewer break-out intellects because the playing field is more level? For instance, no more Maxwells, Newtons, Einsteins, etc. Or is it just that we are unable to see the current visionaries while still living in the same generation as their bodies of work?
It definitely is easier to see “break-out intellects” in retrospect than at the time. It’s also worth realizing that the domains of greatest creativity have shifted over the years. Sometimes they’ve involved science, sometimes not.
Also, it’s usually harder to have something “break-out” happen when there’s an area that’s more institutionalized. Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
What effect do you think monetization of intelligence has had on scientific pursuit? Do you think your decision to delve into private enterprise has lessened your potential contribution to scientific fields?
I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to set my life up so that I can really work on things that I think are worthwhile. And to create an organization that’s good at stimulating me, and taking ideas I have and turning them into reality. It’s great, and I’m certain I’ve been incredibly much more productive than if I’d for example stayed a professor or something. Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
What will be the most promising topics of research in computational science in the near future?
There are lots. Including many based on NKS… some of which I touched on in a blog post I did today: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/05/looking-to-the-future-of-a-new-kind-of-science/
It’d be fun to make an organized list, though. Perhaps something for our annual summer school https://education.wolfram.com/summer/school/ Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
What are, in your opinion, the most important skills (mental and practical) for being able to hold a job at Wolfram Research?
Being smart, and being able to apply your intelligence with good common sense to a range of different issues. Communicating clearly, and interacting well with people. Being able to understand things quickly, get started quickly… but get things finished, at very high quality with great attention to details.
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
Have you ever worked with APL or J or the K/Q programming languages, and what is your opinion of J especially—its usefulness in research, mathematics and industry and perhaps how it compares with Mathematica?
I haven’t personally used APL or J for production purposes, though I studied APL in detail when I was designing SMP, the forerunner of Mathematica. I thought APL had some really interesting ideas, some of which have shown up in Mathematica.
I actually gave the keynote at the APL annual conference in 1989. Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
What can be done to improve natural language search algorithms? For example, this morning on Wolfram|Alpha I tried: “Time it takes to walk 500km” and it searched “time it”. “Time to walk 500km” and it searched for “walk”. “How long does it take to walk 500km” and it searched “how long does it take”. “Time taken to walk 500km at average human walking speed” and it searched “average human walking speed”.
An interesting question… very related to a blog post I recently wrote about “artificial stupidity”: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/04/overcoming-artificial-stupidity/
If we change your input e.g. to “Time it takes to go 500km at 2mph” then it works just fine.
And in fact I think the problem Wolfram|Alpha is having with your input is not so much to do with natural language understanding as such, Read more
January 8, 2013
From: Interview by Lars Mensel and Thore Barfuss, The European
Has data collection become too excessive?
I think it is inevitable. It’s just going to happen. Let me give you a personal example; you can find tons of data about me but until recently you could not find the names of my kids. I know enough about data and decided not to publish their names on the web. Read more
January 8, 2013
From: Interview by Lars Mensel and Thore Barfuss, The European
Can we really trust companies with our personal data?
It’s nice if people trust companies that collect data and hope they don’t do something terrible with it. Trust has been good for the Wolfram Alpha project. People do trust us, probably because we are not as commercial as other companies. And we are not going to use the personal data that we have. Read more
January 8, 2013
From: Interview by Lars Mensel and Thore Barfuss, The European
Do we sometimes overestimate the power of computing?
One thing being discussed right now is the automated grading of student essays. A crazy idea! If that were to be implemented, people would soon learn how to write essays that are rather opaque to humans but will score really well with computers. It is equally mistaken as teaching people how to do calculus by hand. Read more
January 8, 2013
From: Interview by Lars Mensel and Thore Barfuss, The European
What do you think about the idea that data should get an expiration date?
That question has been overlooked for a long time. I know that some people and companies are finally working on it. For years, I have been wondering whether you could build a “digital time safe” to safely store data that only becomes accessible 20 years later. Can you put information away? Read more
March 16, 2013
From: Interview by Quantified Self: A Q&A with Stephen Wolfram
In your estimation, how much of your personal analytics data is passively collected/recorded versus actively collected/recorded?
It’s essentially all passive. I’ve had systems set up at different times, then I’ve just let the systems run. And after a decade or two they’ve accumulated a lot of data.
I should say that quite a few of the systems are set up to send me mail each day with a report on the previous day (how much I typed; Read more
April 26, 2013
From: Interview by Patrick Tucker, IEET
What sort of things have you been able to predict based on the data from your personal analytics?
One thing I found out is that I’m much more habitual than I ever imagined. It’s amazing to see oneself turned into full distribution. It got me thinking about lots of different ways that I could improve my life and times with data. What I realized is that one of the more important things is to have quick feedback about what’s going on, Read more
April 26, 2013
From: Interview by Patrick Tucker, IEET
How do you see personal analytics trends evolving in the context of present-day battles over privacy and over access to information technology? And what has to happen in order for the self-quantification trend to become a truly sustainable movement?
Right now, for most people, it’s dealing with this data. There’s all kinds of plumbing that has to be done. Like, how do you actually get your cell phone call record out? It’s going to stay a complex, multi-part, multi-vendor environment, where people have different phones, email systems, computers, and little devices like pedometers. Read more
April 26, 2013
From: Interview by Patrick Tucker, IEET
Given the future of digitized knowledge, the exponential growth in structured and unstructured data that we can look forward to over the coming decades, is it possible that the space of irreducible knowledge, of unpredictable knowledge—while it will still always exist—is shrinking? Would this mean that the space of predictable knowledge is in fact growing?
Interesting question. Once we know enough, will we just be able to predict everything? In Wolfram|Alpha, for example, we know how to compute lots of things that you might have imagined weren’t predictable. You have a tree in your backyard. It’s such and such a size right now. How big will it be in 10 years? Read more
April 26, 2013
From: Interview by Patrick Tucker, IEET
Where do you see yourself in 10 years? And what do you see yourself having accomplished 10 years from now?
Well, that’s an interesting question. My gosh. That’s the kind of question one’s supposed to ask at a job interview. I never ask those, because I always figure that they’re silly questions. I’m hoping I’ll do a few new things. We’ll see. For the last decade, Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha were my main activities. Read more
April 26, 2013
From: Interview by Patrick Tucker, IEET
Your seminal book, A New Kind of Science, is ten years old. You recently wrote a blog post on the anniversary. Can you talk a little bit about the future of science?
The main idea of A New Kind of Science was to introduce a new way to model things in the world. Three hundred years ago, there was this big transformation in science when it was realized that one could use math, and the formal structure of math, to talk about the natural world. Read more
July 27, 2015
From: Interview by Byron Reese, Gigaom
When do you first remember hearing the term “artificial intelligence”?
That is a good question. I don’t have any idea. When I was a kid, in the 1960s in England, I think there was a prevailing assumption that it wouldn’t be long before there were automatic brains of some kind, and I certainly had books about the future at that time, Read more
July 27, 2015
From: Interview by Byron Reese, Gigaom
Would you agree that AI, up there with space travel, has kind of always been the thing of tomorrow and hasn’t advanced at the rate we thought they would?
Oh, yes. But there’s a very definite history. People assumed, when computers were first coming around, that pretty soon, we’d automate what brains do just like we’ve automated what arms and legs do, and so on. Nobody had any real intuition for how hard that might be. It turned out, for reasons that people simply didn’t understand in the ’40s, Read more
July 27, 2015
From: Interview by Byron Reese, Gigaom
What is the state of the technology? Have we built something as smart as a bird, for instance?
Well, what does it mean to make something that is as smart as X? In the history of artificial intelligence, there’s been a continuing set of tests that people have come up with. If you can do X, then we’ll know you’re as smart as humans, or something like that. Almost every X that’s been defined so far, Read more
July 27, 2015
From: Interview by Byron Reese, Gigaom
What do you think this thing we call “self-awareness and consciousness” is?
I don’t know. I think that it’s a way of describing certain kinds of behaviors, and so on. It’s a way of labeling the world, it’s a way of—okay, let me give a different example, which I think is somewhat related, which is free will. It’s not quite the same thing as consciousness and self-awareness, Read more
July 27, 2015
From: Interview by Byron Reese, Gigaom
If we are fundamentally, at our core, deterministic, but we don’t look it because the math is beyond us, what do you think emotions are? Are they real in the sense that we’re feeling? Will the computer love, and will it hate?
Here’s the terrible thing. We’re building stuff that tries to do emotion-space analysis of things, and so on, looking at whether it’s facial expressions or text or whatever else, and in effect say, “Okay, that means the dopamine level was up at this moment”, because the collective effect of what was going on with that thinking that was happening results in secretion of dopamine, Read more
July 27, 2015
From: Interview by Byron Reese, Gigaom
How many years away, in your mind, are we from AI/robot rights becoming a mainstream topic? Is this a decade, or 25 years, or …?
I think more like a decade. Look, there’s going to be skirmish issues that come up more immediately. The issues that come up more immediately are, “Are AIs responsible?” That is, if your self-driving car’s AI glitches in some way, who is really responsible for that? That’s going to be a pretty near-term issue. Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?
Currently: banana if available. Otherwise chocolate.
(That was easy…) Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What kind of games do you play, digital or analog?
I’m not really into games at all, and never have been.
Somehow whenever I’m exposed to games I end up thinking “in the time I spend playing this game, I could be building something or doing something that isn’t a game”. I guess the point for me is that I really like building and doing things, Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
When are you going back to Hollywood with a show like Numb3rs?
We certainly didn’t create the Numb3rs TV show, but some people at our company had a lot of fun providing math for each episode and the website about all that is still up: http://numb3rs.wolfram.com/ I personally haven’t done as much with Hollywood as I might because I find the high noise-to-signal ratio that tends to exist there very difficult to deal with. Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What’s the biggest technological advancement that has helped your company?
Obviously we wouldn’t exist but for universal computation and the possibility of software….
I have always taken the point of view that I want to design a language the way it should be, independent of what happens to be easy to implement on computers with a particular level of power. It’s helped tremendously over the last 30 years that computers have kept on getting more and more powerful, Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
Are there any things you miss now that you’re an outsider to traditional academia?
I have many friends in academia, and end up interacting quite a lot with academia in one way or another: giving talks, meeting with groups of students, etc.
But I’ve now spent several decades building an environment where I can implement ideas incredibly much faster than I ever could in academia… Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What ages are appropriate to learn Wolfram Language? Do you see Wolfram Language in third world countries like an Open Source platform in the future?
My theory has been that age 12 is where Wolfram Language starts to be the right thing to learn. But I’ve now seen a good number of 9-, 10- and 11-year-olds who seem to be having a great time with it, so at least for some kids I have to revise my estimate down. Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What’s the earliest program you can remember writing?
It was 1972 or 1973 and I was about 13 years old… and I got access to a computer. It was an Elliott 903C programmed with 8 kilowords of (18-bit) ferrite core memory, and programmed with paper tape, and about the size of a large desk.
I wrote a few tiny programs, Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
You are a physicist who seems very keen on understanding the fabric of the universe at the most primitive levels. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard your thoughts on consciousness/qualia. Have you given it much thought?
I think the most interesting issue here is whether there’s a formal theory of the concepts that we seem to form with consciousness, independent of a theory of the physical world. No doubt our actual consciousness emerges from a theory of the physical world, but we can ask whether we can have a formal theory of concepts that doesn’t rely on connection to the physical world. Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
Which superhero from Marvel do you find most scientifically realistic?
I have seen a bunch of Marvel movies… but I’m no expert on the whole array of superheroes….
What’s ultimately possible is always an interesting question. There are plenty of things that get done even though they supposedly “violate the laws of physics”. (I remember when people said that data would never be transmitted on copper wires faster than 1200 baud… Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What do you miss about England that America doesn’t immediately offer?
The candy 🙂 And now there’s even a ban on the import of some British candy to the US.
When I was growing up in England I was always frustrated by what seemed like an irrational level of respect for older people there. And I often said that England would be a good place to be older in, Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What do you think of the current “deep learning” methods? Will that fit into Wolfram software?
Yes, we’ve done a lot with these things, and will be doing a lot more. See e.g. https://www.imageidentify.com that we released a year ago. We’ve also got a lot of machine learning built directly into the Wolfram Language (and we use machine learning to automate it, so you don’t need machine-learning experts to use it). Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
When will Skynet be ready?
Wolfram|Alpha seems to have at least something to say: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=are+you+skynet
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What do you think is the most interesting open problem in mathematics?
One that I’m definitely very interested in is really a metaproblem: how much math is doable?
Gödel’s Theorem tells us that there are mathematical questions that are undecidable from existing axioms of math… but those questions often seem very artificial, and most working mathematicians merrily proceed without worrying about undecidability. On the other hand, Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
You’ve mentioned that you may return to do physics and explain the universe. Now you seem to be pretty excited about the gravitational waves. So, are you still planning to do that?
Oh yes, I definitely hope to return to seeing if my ideas about physics make sense. I was excited about the gravitational wave discovery partly because I saw the beginnings of that project when I was at Caltech 35 years ago… and it’s pretty neat when something comes to fruition after all that time. Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What are your thoughts about the singularity?
I think different people mean different things by it. (Long ago I met I. J. Good, who I believe invented the term “intelligence explosion”… but we mostly talked about biological not technological evolution…) Gosh, there’s a lot to say about this. My Principle of Computational Equivalence implies that “intelligence” exists in lots of things, Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What was it like working with Richard Feynman?
Richard Feynman and I had rather different styles of solving problems … so there was often a certain amount of “I don’t understand what you’re talking about” on both sides. We worked on quantum computing back around 1982 or so. He did hand calculation which I could never believe got the right answer, Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
I have a very important question that many of my colleagues wish to have answered: Would you rather fight 100 duck sized horses, or 1 horse sized duck? How might you use Mathematica to answer this intelligently?
I’m certainly no expert on fighting … but here’s how I might approach the problem. Basically I would want to make models of these creatures—their mechanics, and if possible their behaviors. I know Mathematica has been used a bunch to model quadruped mechanics (e.g. for dinosaurs in movies, and real things). Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What is the one thing any student must try in college?
Hmmmm… I myself was only in college for about a year (in Oxford, long long ago) … and I spent most of my time in an underground computer room where I had access to the ARPANET, doing physics research. So I don’t have much to say from personal experience.
In today’s world, Read more
featured
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
Who is your favorite historical scientist? Why? What is in your opinion the most significant scientific achievement of the human race?
It depends what you mean by “favorite”. There are people who have ended up making contributions that are particularly relevant to me (e.g. Gottfried Leibniz, Kurt Godel, Alan Turing). There are people who would have been fun to meet (e.g. Ramon Llull, Galileo, Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein). And there are people who managed to live their lives well in one way or another around their scientific accomplishments (e.g. Read more
featured
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
How did you manage to start legitimate research on quantum field theory when you were only 15?
I discovered that one could learn things pretty well by reading books (well, today it would be reading the web). I always found (and still find) it much much easier to learn things when I have a particular question I’m trying to answer, or project I’m trying to do. At that time lots of things were happening in particle physics, Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What are your plans and goals for the future?
Oh, so many. Right now a lot of things that make use of the Wolfram Language technology stack. Understanding how to use it to teach computational thinking, to do software development, etc. Then using it (as I have for nearly 30 years now) to develop more technology (AI-related things, etc. etc.) I always maintain a stack of projects that I’m interested in. Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What are your thoughts on Elon Musk?
He’s always fun to talk to … and we’ve been having some interesting exchanges about AI of late. I have to relate one amusing story, though. A few years ago I was at a dinner party with my oldest son (who was then about 15), and my son happened to be sitting away from me but near Elon. Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What is your go-to dinner when you are too tired to make anything else?
Hmmm… I’m not really one for food construction; it’s perhaps embarrassing how few times in my life I’ve made any nontrivial foodform. My default thing to eat tends to be chocolate or fruit…
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
How do you promote creativity inside your developer community?
First, I hope, by providing tools that make it easy to be creative. I’m a big believer in the idea that languages help define what one can think about … and I hope the Wolfram Language lets people think creatively about a lot of things.
At least within our company, I like to try to lead by example. Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
Do you feel you have “slowed down” at all over the years? How do you feel about nootropics or other potential solutions for maintaining or even improving cognitive function?
So far, I’m happy to say that I feel like I’m speeding up rather than slowing down. I’ve progressively learned more and more over the years about how to figure things out, and how to get things done. It probably helps that I have a pretty good memory, so in a first approximation I remember everything I’ve ever learned. Read more
July 20, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
Which do you think is more important to the history of science: the accomplishments of scientific geniuses or the broader research trends of the scientific community?
As in so many things, new ideas and new directions in science are most often the result of leadership by one or a small number of people. But almost always, they have to build on lots of detailed work that’s been done by many other people.
But even after someone comes up with a great idea, Read more
July 20, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
If Turing had died before publishing his seminal Turing machine paper in the 1930s, how much would this have delayed the construction of digital computers?
Interesting question. The idea of universal computation actually arose at about the same time in three places: Gödel’s “general recursive functions”, Turing’s “Turing machines”, and Church’s “lambda calculus”. It turned out that all these formulations are equivalent, and that was actually known pretty quickly. But Turing’s one is much easier to understand, Read more
July 20, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
How realistic do you think it is for data science as a career to become obsolete due to automation in the next twenty years?
What’ll always be important is figuring out what questions one cares about. One of the things we’re doing with the Wolfram Language is to automate a very broad range of the actual operations one needs to do in data science. Oh, and we already have lots of machine learning capabilities for pulling out “interesting things”…
July 20, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
How do you propose we expand STEM education in our public schools? Do you think your software can help?
Lots to say about this. For a start, see https://www.wolfram.com/programming-lab
July 20, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
Everyone likes to point out the scientific inconsistencies in sci-fi movies & TV shows (e.g., completely ignoring the laws of physics). But what do filmmakers miss when they portray scientists and innovators themselves?
I’m often quite shocked at how bad the portrayals of science are even in high-budget movies. Sometimes I can see that getting the science wrong is necessary in order to have the story work. But often the bad science seems to be quite gratuitous. And I have to believe that for extremely little extra effort there’d be an extra market for these movies etc. Read more
July 20, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
Did you have some doubt about leaving academia and going to businesses to pursue your entrepreneur ideas?
Different people are different of course. But for me what’s important is being able to have ideas, and turn them into reality. And it didn’t take me long to realize that I could do that much more effectively in an entrepreneurial business setting than in academia.
I have to say that successful academics typically operate a bit like entrepreneurs anyway—but usually with a bunch of constraints imposed by the big institutional structures they’ve embedded in. Read more
July 20, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
In writing about all of these intelligent people, did you notice any environmental factors which may have contributed to their success?
Interesting question. Richard Feynman always used to tell me that he thought “peace of mind” was a critical prerequisite to doing creative work. But certainly not everyone in the book had that when they were doing their most important work. And actually I think if there’s one theme I noticed it’s that external stimuli and external constraints often seem to play a crucial role. Read more
July 20, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
Who in your book Idea Makers do you relate to most? Or who do you think is most like you, and why?
Difficult question. In terms of the things I’ve been interested in, Alan Turing and Gottfried Leibniz are probably the closest. But in terms of personality, they were very different from each other, and, I think, from me. I’m basically a “long projects” person: I work on projects for decades (Mathematica, Wolfram Language, Read more
July 20, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
How much commonality is there between legendary mathematicians/scientists from ages ago, say from 1816, and more modern scientists? Would those legendary scientists from centuries past be significantly changed if they were brought up in this more modern environment?
Yes, things have certainly changed a lot from 1816 to 2016. (Note that the book does include quite a few recent people too.)
One important practical feature is that people are on average living longer. Ada Lovelace and Ramanujan, for example, would almost certainly have lived decades longer with modern healthcare. Read more
July 20, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
You have an uncommon experience of being (and being around) many prominent figures in the scientific community. How has this influenced the development of the Wolfram Language?
Designing a language that’s supposed to “know about everything” means one has to know about a lot of things oneself! It’s been absolutely crucial that I’ve been exposed to lots of different areas, and gotten to know the originators of lots of fields. At a practical level, it’s very common that I’ll want to get some judgement call on some detailed thing in some particular area. Read more
July 20, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
Are there problems that were difficult to solve (historically) but can now be solved trivially using the Wolfram Language? If so, which are your favorites?
About problems that become easy to solve with the Wolfram Language: yes, lots and lots and lots. People mostly just go and use Mathematica—or now the Wolfram Language—to solve problems, and I don’t hear about what they do. But it’s amazing how often I’ll be at some science or technology event and some prominent person will say “oh, Read more
October 7, 2016
From: Dingyu Chen, Eton Magazine
Should students be set exams that allow them to use such [advanced] computers?
If what one’s trying to test in exams is whether people will be successful at solving problems in real life, then of course the people should be able to use the tools they’d use in real life.
November 7, 2016
From: Interview by Dingyu Chen, Eton Magazine
Will mathematicians need to learn classical mathematics (algebra, analysis, calculus) in the future if computers can do it for us?
Once one’s made something into a definite calculation, then, yes, one can just get a computer to do it. The challenge is in doing the mathematical thinking or computational thinking to get it to the point where it can be explained to a computer. And that’s the important thing for people to learn to do. Read more
November 7, 2016
From: Interview by Dingyu Chen, Eton Magazine
Your products so far have been wildly successful and crucial in the lives of many. Do you have any plans for future releases?
Of course! In early December you’ll see Wolfram|Alpha start letting you “open up the code” so you can take the Wolfram Language code it uses, and do your own computations with it. That will be important to lots of students, but it’s just a corner of our R&D efforts. We’ve been at this for 30 years now, Read more
November 7, 2016
From: Interview by Dingyu Chen, Eton Magazine
What first inspired you to create Wolfram|Alpha?
I was already thinking about making knowledge computable back when I was at Eton more than 40 years ago. For a long time I thought the only way to make a system like that would be to build something that basically emulates a brain. But as a result of a bunch of basic science I did in the 1990s, Read more
November 7, 2016
From: Interview by Dingyu Chen, Eton Magazine
Hypothetically, if you could choose two fields of math, physics or computing to be magically fully researched, which ones would you choose, and why?
I’d like to know the fundamental theory of physics: what’s underneath space and time and quantum mechanics and all the other things we know in physics today.
I’m not sure if you’d quite call it “computing”, but I’d like to know how to capture human concepts in a precise symbolic way that one can compute with. Read more
November 7, 2016
From: Interview by Dingyu Chen, Eton Magazine
What is it like programming and bringing a concept to life? Do you find it challenging and strenuous, or do you feel like you have the freedom to manage your own work?
I’ve spent about 40 years trying to make programming as automated as possible—so we humans basically get to tell computers what we want to achieve, then the computers figure out the grungy details of how to do it. The result is that for me programming is about turning ideas into reality as directly as possible. Read more
November 7, 2016
From: Interview by Dingyu Chen, Eton Magazine
What pushed you to study quantum and particle physics, especially starting from such a young age?
Back when I was at Eton in the early to mid-1970s, particle physics was the most rapidly advancing field of science. It was an exciting time: there were significant new discoveries every few weeks. And it was really exciting for me to be part of that. Today that kind of excitement is what you find in lots of new “computational X” Read more
November 21, 2016
From: Interview by Sarah Lewin, Space.com
How were you approached to work on the movie Arrival?
Because a lot of scientists use our software systems and we produce a lot of interesting graphics, we have a pretty regular stream of requests from moviemakers of various kinds saying, “Can we show this graphic in our movie”. This one was kind of amusing, because it was like—we’re about to start shooting this fairly big-budget movie, Read more
November 21, 2016
From: Interview by Sarah Lewin, Space.com
What parts of the science were already there before you joined on to the Arrival movie project?
There are three levels that one could take the science at. One is the “what the aliens are really doing” type thing, which is future science we don’t know yet, at the other end there’s the high-school level physics, and in the middle is the leading edge of what physics might have to say about it if a great big black spaceship showed up in your backyard today. Read more
November 21, 2016
From: Interview by Sarah Lewin, Space.com
What are your thoughts on the challenge of communication in the movie Arrival?
I think that the basic notion of “what do we mean by intelligence” is—it’s very hard to have an abstract definition of intelligence that goes beyond just saying it does sophisticated computation. There’s an awful lot of stuff that does sophisticated computation, my favorite example being the weather—which many people would say has a mind of its own, Read more
November 21, 2016
From: Interview by Sarah Lewin, Space.com
If there are some aspects of mathematics that might be common for aliens and humans, would there also be a lot that wouldn’t overlap?
[Take] binary, base 2 numbers. The I Ching, from ancient China, kind of uses those—and there are places where they’d been kind of invented a long time ago, but really nobody cared until modern times, as computers and the whole wave of technology that makes good use of binary numbers. Read more
November 21, 2016
From: Interview by Sarah Lewin, Space.com
Is there any concept you invented for the movie Arrival that you’re thinking about exploring more?
[One] thing that I did think about for this movie is the following question: Is there an infinite frontier of technology? If we know the fundamental theory of physics, are we done, or is there always more to discover? What you realize is it’s very similar to the problem of axioms in mathematics and how math is hard, Read more
March 8, 2017
From: Interview by John Horgan, Scientific American
Can you summarize, briefly, the theme of A New Kind of Science? Are you satisfied with the book’s reception?
It’s about studying the computational universe of all possible programs and understanding what they can do. Exact science had been very focused on using what are essentially specific kinds of programs based on mathematical ideas like calculus. My goal was to dramatically generalize the kinds of programs that can be used as models in science, Read more
March 8, 2017
From: Interview by John Horgan, Scientific American
Can the methods you describe in A New Kind of Science answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing?
Not that I can see so far. Read more
March 8, 2017
From: Interview by John Horgan, Scientific American
Can the methods you describe in A New Kind of Science solve “the hard problem”? That is, can they explain how matter can become conscious?
One of the core discoveries that I discussed in the book is what I call the Principle of Computational Equivalence—which implies that a very wide range of systems are equivalent in their computational sophistication. And in particular, it means that brains are no more computationally sophisticated than lots of systems in nature, Read more
March 8, 2017
From: Interview by John Horgan, Scientific American
The concept of computation, like information, presupposes the existence of mind. So when you suggest that the universe is a computer, aren’t you guilty of anthropomorphism, or perhaps deism (assuming the mind for whom the computation is performed is God)?
The concept of computation doesn’t in any way presuppose the existence of mind… and it’s an incorrect summarization of my work to say that I suggest “the universe is a computer”.
Computation is just about following definite rules. The concept of computation doesn’t presuppose a “substrate”, any more than talking about mathematical laws for nature presupposes a substrate. Read more
March 8, 2017
From: Interview by John Horgan, Scientific American
What’s the ultimate purpose of the Wolfram Language? Can it fulfill Leibniz’s dream of a language that can help us resolve all questions, moral as well as scientific? Can it provide a means of unambiguous communication between all intelligent entities, whether biological or artificial?
My goal with the Wolfram Language is to have a language in which computations can conveniently be expressed for both humans and machines—and in which we’ve integrated as much knowledge about computation and about the world as possible. In a way, the Wolfram Language is aimed at finally achieving some of the goals Leibniz had 300 years ago. Read more
March 8, 2017
From: Interview by John Horgan, Scientific American
Are autonomous machines, capable of choosing their own goals, inevitable? Is there anything we humans do that cannot—or should not—be automated?
When we see a rock fall, we could say either that it’s following a law of motion that makes it fall, or that it’s achieving the “goal” of being in a lower-potential-energy state. When machines—or for that matter, brains—operate, we can describe them either as just following their rules, or as “achieving certain goals”. Read more
March 8, 2017
From: Interview by John Horgan, Scientific American
What is the most meaningful goal that any intelligence, human or inhuman, can pursue?
The notion of a “meaningful goal” is something that relies on a whole cultural context—so there can’t be a useful abstract answer to this question.
March 8, 2017
From: Interview by John Horgan, Scientific American
Have you ever suspected that God exists, or that we live in a simulation?
If by “God” you just mean something beyond science: well, there’s always going to be something beyond science until we have a complete theory of the universe, and even then, we may well still be asking, “Why this universe, and not another?”
What would it mean for us to “live in a simulation”? Read more
March 8, 2017
From: Interview by John Horgan, Scientific American
What’s your utopia?
If you mean: what do I personally want to do all day? Well, I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been able to set up my life to let me spend a large fraction of my time doing what I want to be doing, which usually means creating things and figuring things out. Read more
March 21, 2018
From: Interview by Tim Urban, New York Magazine
Have we seen extraterrestrial intelligence? What might that mean?
Well my own suspicion is that the first form of nonhuman-aligned intelligence that we’re getting exposed to is artificial intelligence. My guess about how things will develop historically is we’ll get more and more used to the idea of AI and nonhuman intelligence and so on. Eventually, we’ll get used to the idea that there are these kind of nonhuman intelligences embodied in what’s possible in the computational universe and what we can use for AI. Read more
March 21, 2018
From: Interview by Tim Urban, New York Magazine
Why is it important to try to communicate to aliens and send out time capsules and capture information about us?
I think it’s having pride about what we’ve achieved and building a monument to it. That’s as important as it is to imagine that at some point, some alien is gonna pick it up and do something with it. It’s like, Why were the pyramids built? Well, it was probably in large part as an exercise for the time, Read more
April 3, 2018
From: Interview by Harrison Tasoff, Space.com
How did 2001: A Space Odyssey affect the projects you’ve embarked on and the approach you took to them?
The notion of computers as visual things is probably something that I viscerally absorbed from 2001. Because at the time when 2001 came out, computers were absolutely not visual things. In the first computer I used, its only form of IO [input/ output] was a paper tape reader and punch and a tele-printer. Read more
April 3, 2018
From: Interview by Harrison Tasoff, Space.com
Works of science fiction make many predictions. What differentiates the things that won’t happen from those that haven’t happened yet?
In the course of my life, for example, probably the thing that has most dramatically changed is computers. And what’s perhaps interesting about that is there are many things that happened as a result that were not readily predictable.
There are details [in the movie] like the fact that they don’t have the idea of multiple windows. Read more
April 3, 2018
From: Interview by Harrison Tasoff, Space.com
Given the differences between this wave of space enthusiasm and that of the Cold War, do you think we’ll see things more like the space travel depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
I think the answer is yes. When we’ll see that, I don’t know.
I don’t know what will cause the everyday person to really experience space. Other than that they see cool pictures sent back from a spacecraft. I think that space today is definitely a spirit of adventure-type activity, as much as anything. Read more
May 14, 2018
From: Interview by Lara Crigger, ETF.com
What sort of applications could smart contracts have in the financial markets?
In the world of finance, it’s already happened a bit. For the last, I don’t know, 30 years, options [contracts] have been expressed in essentially an algorithmic way.
But mortgages haven’t. So, if you take this multipage mortgage document and express it in computable form, then you can take 10,000 and do systematic analysis on them. Read more
May 14, 2018
From: Interview by Lara Crigger, ETF.com
What sort of limitations do smart contracts introduce that don’t exist in the status quo right now?
You lose wiggle room. Instead, it’s basically, “Well, there was this piece of code we set up, and it ran, and these are the consequences”. In a sense, it’s more like dealing with the natural world. You can ask, “Why did the tornado turn left?” Well, ultimately it’s the laws of physics that determined that.
May 29, 2018
From: Interview by Byron Reese, Gigaom.com
What is intelligence?
It’s a complicated and slippery concept. It’s useful to start, maybe, in thinking about what may be an easier concept, what is life? You might think that was an easy thing to define. Here on Earth, you can pretty much tell whether something is alive or not. You dig down, you look in a microscope, Read more
May 29, 2018
From: Interview by Byron Reese, Gigaom.com
Do you still say thank you to the automatic ticket thing when you leave the parking garage?
Yes, to my children’s great amusement. I have made a principle of doing that for a long time.
May 29, 2018
From: Interview by Byron Reese, Gigaom.com
What do you think the future is going to be like, in 10 years, 20, 50, 100?
What we will see is an increasing mirror on human condition, so to speak. That is, what we are building are things that essentially amplify any aspect of the human condition. Then it, sort of, reflects back on us. What do we want? What are the goals that we want to have achieved? Read more
August 23, 2018
From: Interview by Haley Campbell-Gross, Human Current
What would be your advice for a young complexity thinker who just wants to dive into this field?
Well one piece of advice that might sound self-serving, but it isn’t in a sense is that I spent a lot of time building tools that I think are really well optimized to actually explore many questions. But among them, questions and complexity the whole Wolfram Language stack is really well optimized for these kinds of explorations. Read more
March 3, 2019
From: Reddit AMA
Do you have a “productivity reward function” that helps you decide which tools are most helpful rather than fun technology for its own sake? For many people, technology enables distractions rather than productivity… Do you have any systems to guard against that to maintain focus? Finally, Wolfram Language aside, which of these tools has given you the most benefit, that you would most recommend to others?
My “reward function” is basically “do I actually go on using it?”. I like to make sure I try as much leading-edge tech as possible, because I want to understand it. But when it isn’t really useful to me, I stop using it pretty quickly.
I think the main way I stay focused is that I have so many projects that I want to do, Read more
March 4, 2019
From: Reddit AMA
What have been the most useful personal analytics that you’ve tracked? What have been the most interesting or surprising finding that you’ve discovered about yourself or your life as a result?
The most useful thing by far that I have is a good email archive, going back 30 years, and well searchable. Also an OCR’ed archive of pretty much every piece of paper in my life. As far as data goes, I find my real-time dashboard of email backlog as a function of time pretty helpful. Read more
March 4, 2019
From: Reddit AMA
Do you see working from home to be a more common and expected thing in the future?
I have to say that I’ve been “working from home” for most of my working life (i.e. 40+ years). I’ve had some fine offices to go to, but somehow I always end up reverting to working at home. It’s not that I don’t like people, but somehow I find I’m more productive at home. Read more
March 4, 2019
From: Reddit AMA
Do you think there will ever be a treatment for math disorders such as Dyscalculia, and how do you think software may be able to assist this effort?
When I was a kid I used to claim I was “math challenged” (well, I used different words because I spoke British English then). That was why I started building computer tools to help me … and eventually built Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, etc.!
Even before I’d built those tools, I was using computers to do math … Read more
March 4, 2019
From: Reddit AMA
Do you use software to keep track of all or some of the projects happening in your company? Is it really just email threads? Do you use a slack-like application? Do you use something to schedule your day and/or keep track of what you want to be doing?
We have a good project management team and system at our company. I think probably the project management culture is the most important part. Different project teams end up using different specific software systems (some use Jira, some use RT, some use homegrown solutions, etc.) We have pretty active RocketChat going on around our company. Read more
March 4, 2019
From: Reddit AMA
You gather data on your daily activities using Mathematica. As more biofeedback tech (smart watches, neuro tech, etc.) comes along what will Mathematica’s role be in helping make use of this data in a meaningful way? Also if I want to make use of a Muse device’s data (EEG data) what would be the best approach for doing so in Mathematica?
Mathematica/WL have been able to import EDF for a long time. EEG is really complicated, though I have to believe that modern machine learning should finally be able to unscramble it better.
As far as decoding biofeedback data: ultimately one needs a model for the human to know what it means. Read more
March 4, 2019
From: Reddit AMA
Apparently you did a talk at Y Combinator in its early days. Any particular memories of Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian and Aaron Swartz when they were young?
I did do a talk, and even went to the very first Demo Day. As it happens, I was there with my then-10-year-old precociously-business-oriented son … and he kept a scorecard of the companies. His best pick was a company called Kiko, that was a calendar system. I almost invested in that. Read more
March 4, 2019
From: Reddit AMA
You mentioned putting on a tiny camera which takes pictures every 30 seconds while at trade shows. Which camera do you use? Has anyone ever asked you to pause the camera?
It’s what was originally called Memoto, then changed its name to Narrative, and sadly didn’t make it commercially. (I think they really saw it as a home/consumer product; I’m pretty sure the real market is more professional, for trade shows, validating behavior, etc.)
Particularly several years ago, people sometimes said “what’s that?” Read more
March 4, 2019
From: Reddit AMA
Why is math so awesome and how can we make it more accessible and easier to teach?
Not really my subject here… But… What’s even more awesome than math IMHO is the whole computational universe… which I think of as a generalization of math. Still, math is basically the single largest intellectual artifact our civilization has built so far. I like teaching it by doing abstract experiments with computers, Read more
March 4, 2019
From: Reddit AMA
What’s an easy addition that would improve your infrastructure in the next year or two? Could you add some NLP to scan online papers and surface ones that, for example, relate to your current project(s)?
I’ve been experimenting with using our latest ML/NLP tools. One basic thing I’d like is to have a system that alerts me if a question I sent out in email didn’t get answered after a certain time. It’s a slightly tricky problem. A student at last year’s Wolfram Summer School made a decent “is it a question” Read more
March 4, 2019
From: Reddit AMA
About mobile technology, do you think that smartphones will suppress desktop computing? What is the future of mobile vs desktop computing in business? What do you think about programming in mobile in the future?
For myself, I really like having a keyboard that I can type fast on. Our Wolfram Cloud app runs fine on a smartphone, and lets you bring up a notebook and do programming. In a few emergency situations I’ve used this, and it’s worked better than I expected. But I can’t see myself forsaking a keyboard for serious work. Read more
March 4, 2019
From: Reddit AMA
What do you feel about complexity after 30 years of developing a system?
This is a confusing question for me, because I’ve worked a lot on complexity in science (and the launching of “complexity theory” back in the early 1980s etc.) But I’m guessing you mean: complexity of a software system.
It’s very important that Wolfram Language is based on a small number of powerful principles (e.g. Read more
March 4, 2019
From: Reddit AMA
Do you ever use the alias “Stephen Tungsten”?
No. But it’s always nice to have an immediate “favorite element”…
March 4, 2019
From: Reddit AMA
If you were to leave Wolfram tomorrow, what projects would you pursue?
There are two big projects I’m really hoping to do soon (though I’m hoping they’ll go faster, not slower, with me being part of the company).
One is trying to finish my effort to find the fundamental theory of physics. Of course I may be wrong about how physics works… but the current ideas about physics (which I understand very well) are basically 100 years old … Read more
March 26, 2019
From: Interview by Nick Douglas, Lifehacker
How do you decide which of your work processes you are going to optimize or not?
The meta point is, just keep the thinking apparatus engaged while you’re doing what you’re doing. That is, if I notice that there’s something I’m doing that’s obviously silly and repetitive, I’m not just saying “Oh that’s the way it has to be”. Just like I try and solve problems in lots of other areas, Read more
March 26, 2019
From: Interview by Nick Douglas, Lifehacker
Are you normally checking your heart rate stats every day?
Most of the things that I keep are completely automated and I don’t do anything with them. The main way that I see them is because I get mail sent to me every day with the summaries of different things. I’ll glance at that mail for probably half a second or something, Read more
March 26, 2019
From: Interview by Nick Douglas, Lifehacker
When you’re deciding what to track, does that usually come about because you found some new device or system that lets you track something easily, and you’re like “OK, let’s just try it and see if anything interesting happens”? Or is this more goal-oriented?
Anything I can track, I track. And most of these systems, once they’re set up, I never have to think about them again. Years ago I started taking a picture of my computer screens every, I don’t know what it is, 30 seconds or a minute or something. And that’s been running for years and years and years, Read more
March 26, 2019
From: Interview by Nick Douglas, Lifehacker
How do you avoid constant maintenance of your personal tracking systems?
First thing is, the more you can dashboard it in real time or every day, the less likely you are [to let the system fail]. Some report that came in this morning, a piece of it was blank. So I know that immediately. Something failed yesterday. I admit that there’s a bit of cheating going on there, Read more
March 26, 2019
From: Interview by Nick Douglas, Lifehacker
Are there any tools you use to find insights from the data you collect, without having to wait for your own human insight?
I’ll do some visualization, maybe I’ll do some fancy machine learning thing if I think it’s going to be useful. But it tends to be human-initiated.
The fundamental thing about good data science is, can you notice the unexpected. And one of the problems with being very clever about the automation is, Read more
July 24, 2019
From: Interview by Will Carey, Creative Chair
More recently there seems to have been an increase in filmmakers who want their projects to have a sound scientific foundation. Do you think that this is important, and if so why?
I always think it’s nice when a movie lets one engage intellectually as well as emotionally, and having a sound “science story” is a way to help achieve this. I think filmmakers often assume that the science will get in the way of the story they want to tell. But for me it’s just that one has to be creative about the science as well as about everything else in the movie. Read more
July 24, 2019
From: Interview by Will Carey, Creative Chair
Do you think that the logograms in the movie Arrival were the most appropriate output for the alien language, or, if you had been in involved at an earlier stage, would you have suggested an alternative design?
I think the logograms looked very nice. If we’d been involved earlier then, yes, we might have suggested slightly different ways to assemble them from grammatical parts. But I don’t think people watching the movie (as opposed to picking apart every frame!) would have noticed the difference.
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. Read more
July 24, 2019
From: Interview by Will Carey, Creative Chair
Theoretically, would 3D printing ever be possible on a molecular level?
I think so. Something like this was an early objective of nanotechnology, but it was considered too difficult, and largely abandoned. Traditional synthetic chemistry tries to build molecules by applying a sequence of reactions that effectively transform the molecule. I have long thought there should be a direct way to build any molecule that’s stable. Read more
July 24, 2019
From: Interview by Will Carey, Creative Chair
If you died and got reincarnated as a song, what would that song be?
Hmmm. I’m guessing my brain has 100 trillion or so synaptic weights, that encode my memories, etc. And I suppose you could transmit those, even as music, though at least for now they’d be pretty hard to reconstruct as “me”. My scientific work, particularly around my Principle of Computational Equivalence, has led me to believe that a wide range of things, Read more
October 3, 2019
From: Interview by Matt Mullenweg, Distributed.blog
Would you consider management or running a company computationally reducible?
This is one of the embarrassing things about people who like to think they’ve invented paradigms for thinking about stuff. The question is, “Can you live your own paradigm?” And it’s often the case in these things where I can see something developing at the company—I’ve been doing this a long time so I know how this story ends. Read more
November 4, 2019
From: Interview by Margaret Harris, Physics World
What are some examples of ways that thinking computationally, rather than mathematically, about a system can aid understanding?
For 300 years mathematical equations were the dominant method used to make models of things. In just the last decade or so, there’s been a kind of silent revolution in modeling, and new models of almost any concept or system—regardless of whether it is physical, engineering, social, biological—have started to be based on computation (and effectively, Read more
November 4, 2019
From: Interview by Margaret Harris, Physics World
What’s the rationale behind developing the Wolfram Language?
The concept of Wolfram Language (which is a direct extension of my original vision for Mathematica) is to have a computational language that can describe things in the world—things people want to talk about—in computational terms. It’s common to take small pieces of natural language (like “density of tungsten”) and have our natural language understanding system turn them into symbolic representations from which we can do computation. Read more
November 4, 2019
From: Interview by Margaret Harris, Physics World
Why do you think physicists, in particular, should consider framing problems in computational, rather than mathematical, terms?
Computation is a generalization of mathematics. Yes, there are plenty of systems that have traditionally been studied in physics that can be modeled mathematically, for example with differential equations. But there are a lot more systems (including plenty of physical ones) that need a generalization of the equations approach. There’s a lot of new physics that’s made possible by this.
November 4, 2019
From: Interview by Margaret Harris, Physics World
What role do you think computation will play in the future of physics?
Physics was early in using computers to aid in working with its existing paradigms, and I would like to think that Mathematica helped with that. The biggest growth directions, I think, will be in the use of computation as a paradigm for physics. Part of this involves using computational models for physical systems. Read more
November 4, 2019
From: Interview by Margaret Harris, Physics World
Why did you create Mathematica?
Because I wanted to use it myself. I was interested in physics from a young age, and I started doing physics research when I was in my early teens, in the mid-1970s. I didn’t like doing all the mathematical calculations that were needed, and I thought it should be possible to automate them. Read more
November 4, 2019
From: Interview by Margaret Harris, Physics World
How has Mathematica changed over the past 30 years?
Ninety-five percent of what’s in it now wasn’t there 30 years ago. The core principles of the system have stood the test of time extremely well, and I’m pleased to say that almost any Version 1 program from 1988 will still run in Version 12 today (something that is very rare in the computing world). Read more
November 4, 2019
From: Interview by Margaret Harris, Physics World
How is computing different from programming?
The key to computational language is to find a way to express whatever one wants to talk about in a form that a computer can understand. Programming languages are about starting from the underlying operations in a computer and working out how to tell the computer which operations to perform. A programming language has concepts like arrays or pointers. Read more
November 20, 2019
From: Interview by Garett Sloane, AdAge
If not Facebook and Twitter, what entities would create the social algorithms that sort news feeds?
The thing I was most dealing with was automated ranking of content. That is one of the big issues, obviously. There is lots of content out there in the world. A lot of what is important about these platforms these days is their ability to rank what content a particular person should see and when. Read more
November 20, 2019
From: Interview by Garett Sloane, AdAge
Will there ever be a perfect AI moral arbiter?
The answer is no. We humans would have to agree this is the perfect ethical code we want to follow, and the reality and the lessons of history say that’s not something everybody is going to agree on.
So, what do you actually do? You can make the final ranking of content be something that users are not trusting these platforms to do but something that they’re trusting brands to do. Read more
November 20, 2019
From: Interview by Garett Sloane, AdAge
Why would people want a brand to run their news feed?
I trust my final ranking provider, which is some brand that I’ve known about for decades, to be the thing that is defining my way of thinking about the world that represents the values that I want in my news feed.
It’s nothing really new. People have always had a choice to read this newspaper or that newspaper. Read more
November 20, 2019
From: Interview by Garett Sloane, AdAge
There has been a lot of concern that CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg decide what can and can’t be seen on platforms. How do you address that?
One of the mistakes that shouldn’t be made is [assuming] that somehow technology will solve the problem. There’s a technical component to it that is quite sophisticated and complicated, but it’s not something that at end of day Mark Zuckerberg or anyone is going to be able to say “We’re going to have AI figure out what the right thing to do is”. Read more
November 20, 2019
From: Interview by Garett Sloane, AdAge
Why did you propose to Congress that they hand over control of social media algorithms, giving outside companies the ability to sort posts for users in news feeds?
The reason I agreed to testify when I did was because things were being proposed that didn’t make any scientific and technological sense, and so I thought I should point that out. And then I realized, “Gosh I’m just going to come and say a bunch of negative things about things that won’t work. Read more
December 6, 2019
From: Interview by Jeff D’Alessio, The News-Gazette
When it comes to the workplace, what is your one unbreakable rule?
Don’t (BS).
December 6, 2019
From: Interview by Jeff D’Alessio, The News-Gazette
What is your philosophy on meetings?
I like to do ones in which things are actually figured out. Most days, I’ll have meetings scheduled back-to-back for many hours. I believe in thinking in public, figuring things out with people, in meetings, with my thought processes visible.
We have a very geodistributed company, and I’ve been a remote CEO for 28 years, Read more
December 6, 2019
From: Interview by Jeff D’Alessio, The News-Gazette
What is your daily exercise routine like?
Very fixed. I like to do the first two hours of my day, which usually means my first two meetings, while walking. When it’s nice weather, I walk outside, sometimes wearing a contraption so I can type on my computer when I’m walking.
Other times, I’ll use a computer that I have set up on a treadmill. Read more
December 6, 2019
From: Interview by Jeff D’Alessio, The News-Gazette
What is the worst job you ever had?
I haven’t really had standard kinds of job-with-a-boss types of jobs. I’ve been a CEO for more than half my life, and before that I was a professor for a while.
As it happens, the last class I taught as a professor, back in 1988, was the only undergraduate course I ever taught. Read more
December 6, 2019
From: Interview by Jeff D’Alessio, The News-Gazette (unpublished)
What is the hardest thing about being a leader?
I think I’ve never found the “leader” thing difficult; I’ve been doing it most of it my life (and I’ve been a tech CEO for 33 years now). What I find difficult is situations in which I’m not the leader. I tend to avoid “be on a committee” kinds of things. Read more
December 6, 2019
From: Interview by Jeff D’Alessio, The News-Gazette (unpublished)
What can’t you live without?
The technology I’ve built! The biggest part of that is the Wolfram Language. I originally started building the precursor of what’s now the Wolfram Language back in 1979—because I wanted to use it. And for more than three decades I’ve used it for many many things every day. And it’s not only been a practical tool for me to create technology, Read more
December 6, 2019
From: Interview by Jeff D’Alessio, The News-Gazette (unpublished)
What’s the last luxury you indulged in?
I like to maximize my productivity, so I get all kinds of things to help with that. An example is that I have various computers, of different sizes, that I can use in different places or different circumstances. I wrote a long piece about this kind of thing recently: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-productive-life-some-details-of-my-personal-infrastructure
December 6, 2019
From: Interview by Jeff D’Alessio, The News-Gazette (unpublished)
What’s the most beneficial college class you’ve taken?
My college experience (at Oxford University) was rather nonstandard. I went to college fairly young (age 16), but was already doing physics research, etc. The way the Oxford system worked at the time, one was only studying one subject (physics, in my case) and one didn’t actually have to go to lectures. Read more
December 6, 2019
From: Interview by Jeff D’Alessio, The News-Gazette (unpublished)
What time do you get up?
I start my day around 10 am…
December 6, 2019
From: Interview by Jeff D’Alessio, The News-Gazette (unpublished)
What’s the next big thing in your line of work?
Putting computational intelligence into everything. That’s the path I’ve been on for many decades, and it’s exciting to see it coming to fruition. Personally, I also I happen to have recently made a bit of a breakthrough in a fundamental science project I’ve been interested in for 40+ years, which just might lead to something rather spectacular….
December 16, 2019
From: Interview by Jeff D’Alessio, The News-Gazette
In what ways are you frugal?
Because I’m in the tech business, I tend to always get the latest of every tech gadget. But when it comes to other things, I tend to keep them a long time. I just bought a new car, but my last one I had for a decade.
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
What was it like to grow up in England in the ’60s?
I don’t know. I thought that I was a typical growing-up-in-the-’60s kid in England. I got really interested in space because space was a thing that was happening at that time, and that was a very American-oriented thing. In England at that time, the US seemed like a pretty far-off place. Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
Growing up, did you play any sports? Were you just a nerd?
I didn’t do sports. I actually had elaborate schemes for avoiding doing sports. For example, cricket was a big thing, and the few times I ended up playing cricket I discovered that cricket has this thing called overs: when the whole field is reflected, and people change their positions, perhaps because they’re getting so damn bored standing around. Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
Is it true that you had difficulty learning arithmetic in school?
Oh yeah. I was terrible at arithmetic. I found it boring. In one of these educational lessons about education, when I was seven or something, there was always this game of who can do arithmetic facts, and I discovered that there’s only one fact that you needed to know to win that game most of the time, Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
Do you think that we should teach physics before math? Is that possible?
I don’t think physics is the thing. I think computation is the thing that is the paradigm of today’s world, just as a few hundred years ago it was a big deal when people realized you could use math to figure out stuff about the world. That’s what led to modern physics, Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
How do you define computation?
What is computational thinking? As far as I’m concerned, it’s organizing your thoughts clearly enough that you can explain them to a sufficiently smart computer. That means if we’re saying… Here’s a type of problem that’s a computational thinking problem. Let’s say you’re given a point on Earth… given its latitude and longitude… Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
Who were your heroes when you were at Eton?
I wasn’t really a very hero-oriented character. I didn’t really have… I mean, I wanted to be a physicist at that time. I knew about a bunch of the famous physicists of then and the famous physicists of before then. I started meeting those people by the time I was 14, Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
Do you have a story about Steve Jobs, and how he helped in naming Mathematica?
Steve was… I started interacting with him pretty soon after we had very early versions of Mathematica because he was going to bring out this NeXT computer and it was oriented towards education. We made this deal early on to bundle what would be called Mathematica on the NeXT computer so everybody who got a NeXT could use Mathematica. Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
Did Steve Jobs ever try to explain math or physics to you?
No, I don’t think so. It turns out I know somebody who knew Steve in high school. The person who I know who knew Steve in high school is now a physicist. I actually saw him recently at Washington. He was like, “Yeah, Steve was always kind of a weird person in high school. Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
What is computational paradigm?
It’s thinking about things in computational terms, so thinking about… given a question, trying to formulate it with the kinds of thinking that you could talk to a smart computer about.
You have this giant display on your wall of a rhinoceros. I’m thinking about how do I make that rhinoceros computational? Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
Are we a simulation?
This whole simulation argument thing, it’s kind of charming how some of these theological, religious ideas and so on get reiterated in these very different, bizarre wrappings. It’s kind of like if we look at our universe. One thing about our universe… this is almost a theological fact about our universe… Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
What is your reaction to the reputation of science these days, particularly at the highest levels of our government?
Science is in some ways its own worst enemy in that regard because what’s happened is that there are things that science has done a really good job of establishing. There are things where there is science that can be said about them, but it’s kind of overreached in some way or another, Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
Who’s the smartest person you ever met?
I don’t rank people by smartness. You’ve got to realize the question of… if it was the case that everything that came up somebody else could figure out and then that everything you think about, somebody else is there in front of you, able to figure it out. Then you’d say, Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
What do you want your legacy to be?
I don’t know. It’s an interesting question. Now that I’m getting old, I’m supposed to think about questions like that.
There are things that I’ve done… particularly, understanding the computational universe, building this computational language. These are things that, if nothing dreadfully derails, I think I can confidently say that both of these things will end up being of long-term importance. Read more
March 16, 2020
From: Reddit AMA
What would be the disadvantages from working from home that you have found?
Some people find that it’s more difficult to get engagement in larger groups of people when they’re not physically together. Personally, I don’t find this. I think it’s mostly a question of having energy in running the meeting; that’s important in keeping people engaged. Also, realistically, there are meetings where not everyone has to be engaged all the time; Read more
March 16, 2020
From: Reddit AMA
What is the minimum setup to remote work, and what is an ultimate setup for remote developers?
I’ve sometimes used what I consider the minimum when I’m traveling. For me, it’s just a laptop and a good headset. The “next level” involves a secondary screen that I can use to do a bit of multitasking when I’m sharing my main laptop screen.
For longer periods, I find it helpful for some (but not all) tasks to have big monitors. Read more
March 16, 2020
From: Reddit AMA
Our company just started remote work today. We have our daily stand-up in the morning as well as a casual catch-up in the evening just before we finish. Is this a good way to go about it?
Do it by audio. You don’t need to physically have everyone there. Just make sure they all have good audio connections (no weird “people sounding like they’re in caves” etc.). Personally I’ve never found video useful. (The closest I get is that if I think people are not paying attention, I’ll sometimes threaten that we should switch video on … Read more
March 16, 2020
From: Reddit AMA
What can you say to reassure managers and CEOs who are concerned that if they can’t see people working, they might not be working?
For me, the most important thing is what people produce, not which particular hour of which day they did it. Sometimes there are things that need to be done on a short timescale, and I pay a lot of attention to whether they’re done.
People in our company send out email reports about what they’re doing (usually weekly or monthly), Read more
March 16, 2020
From: Reddit AMA
How do you motivate staff that you know are dealing with their own anxieties and personal issues?
In general, I think it’s my responsibility to make sure that people are doing things that are interesting and important (and to communicate why those things are important and interesting). And then it’s the responsibility of me and our management chain to make sure that people are doing things which are a good fit for their skills, Read more
March 16, 2020
From: Reddit AMA
How do you avoid distractions in your home?
Right now I’m sitting in my home office and there’s nothing really to distract me here 🙂
Realistically … I work on long projects where I seem to remain focused for a decade or more … but locally I can be quite distractible. Like I just glanced over at my email even as I’m writing this. Read more
March 16, 2020
From: Reddit AMA
What would you say to a manager who wants employees engaged in remote work to be on a webcam meeting all day so they can be monitored?
One wonders what the manager is doing so that they are in a position to just be “watching other people work” 🙂
The only thing that I’ve heard is that sometimes there are groups where people like to have videos of each other running, as a kind of simulation of being in an office together. Read more
March 16, 2020
From: Reddit AMA
Describe your usual day, worst day and the perfect day of your work.
I have personal analytics tools that tell me how productive I am. A very good day is one where I type more than 100,000 characters. (I wonder how this AMA will contribute for today…)
On a good day I’ll get on a roll and just start producing stuff. If I’m working on something on my own, Read more
March 16, 2020
From: Reddit AMA
What does it take to intern or begin a starting position working on the Wolfram Language remotely?
Go to wolfram.com/careers!
A very good way to get involved is our annual Summer School https://education.wolfram.com/summer/school/ We’re not sure how this is going to work this year, but we expect to do something.
It’s notable that almost all of the instructors at the Summer School (who are mostly R&D staff at our company) were alumni of the Summer School in previous years. Read more
March 16, 2020
From: Reddit AMA
Do you ever work from your living room or dining room table? Or is it important to only work from your “home office” setup to keep things productive?
Mostly I work in my home office because I have the best setup there. Sometimes (e.g. at a meal time) I’ll take a laptop to somewhere else in the house, though usually it’s just “backup” in case my family gets out their laptops too.
I also have a computer connected to a treadmill, Read more
March 31, 2020
From: Jai Preston
How early on did you notice this part of your character that is so obsessed with uncharted territory?
Looking back it’s pretty clear I was always that way. But my self image was just that I “did things”. I didn’t really pay attention to the fact that they were things that hadn’t been done before. In fact, I don’t think I really internalized that until I had to go to effort explaining to other people why they should care about the organizational things I was trying to build …
March 31, 2020
From: Jai Preston
Running a single, simple company is one thing. Certainly you’re quite an obsessive person. Do you find it hard to switch between focuses and/or problems? Can you work on two such great problems in the same day without something less cognitively demanding (such as sleep) to break them up?
I used to find it somewhat hard. But in the past 20 years I’ve trained myself to switch quickly. New meeting, new topic (or not a meeting at all): I just have to start thinking about the new topic, and I quickly get drawn in. (Before 20 years ago, it was different. Read more
March 31, 2020
From: Jai Preston
Did you go all in on remote CEOing pre-wife and pre-kids, or the reverse? And how was your schedule and/or productivity impacted with the change?
I met my wife after I’d been a CEO for a while, but before I was a remote CEO (and, yes, we’ve now been married a long time). Kids came after I’d been remote for a few years. I might have data that would confirm or deny this, but my impression is that the main effect of having a family is that my schedule got more regular, Read more