Wolfram Research is pimping a new, as yet unavailable offering called Wolfram Alpha. I honestly have no idea what he's getting at here, but I'm intrigued. He doesn't give any concrete examples of how this would be used, so I have no way of knowing whether this would even be relevant to my life, but, in classic Wolfram fashion, he seems to suggest that it will be relevant to everybody's life and will, in time, become the most important thing in the universe. However, via Crooked Timber, I see that there is going to be some sort of demo/webcast/talk or something, so maybe it will become more clear at that point.
As a bit of background: I did my doctorate at U of I, where Steven Wolfram is nominally an adjunct professor in the physics department (although I never, ever saw him in the building.) Wolfram, the company, is based in Champaign, and Wolfram, the person, gave a CAS/Millercomm lecture when I was there about NKS. It was interesting, as it went. People have very diverging opinions about it, and they're closely linked to their opinion about Wolfram himself, who is a very brilliant but very polarizing personality. (He published his first paper on high energy theory when he was 16.) Nigel Goldenfeld, who I consider myself privileged to think of as a friend, thinks very highly of Wolfram's work. But, he also published a paper which tends to seriously undercut some of the premises of Wolfram's magnum opus, A New Kind of Science. Then, there is also this famous review/screed from a fairly well informed player, albeit one with an axe to sharpen, titled A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity. It's a very amusing read, and offers an interesting perspective, but it is tainted with a heavy helping of argumentum ad hominem (which is what makes it so much fun to read.)
In any case, you are welcome to draw your own conclusions, but I predict, if the past is any guide, that Wolfram Alpha, whatever it is, will be interesting, in a parochial sort of way, but will be far from game changing.
UPDATE
Here's the video. I'll have some more comments after I can carve out an hour and a half to watch it.
About Me
- Matt Gordon
- Palo Alto, CA
- I'm a postdoctoral researcher in the Block Lab at Stanford University. I'm interested in optical tweezers, single molecule fluorescence, and RNA structure and dynamics. You can reach me at mpgordon AT NO SPAM stanford.edu. My CV can be found here.
2 comments:
Thanks for the Sharizi batshit link. It is an amusing perspective, but not without content.
I covered Nigel's 2004 work in Physical Review Focus. I had to fight to keep the "nice, small paper" quote, which I thought captured Wolfram's unique voice succinctly. For anyone else, I would have written it off as a goof and paraphrased it with something more polite.
Hey Don, thanks for stopping by my little slice of the intarwebs. That quote is classic, and you're right, it says a lot. To a man who wrote a 2000 page book, "small" is probably considered a pejorative. I'm tempted to try to dig up some famous examples of important "small" papers. In my field, the most obvious one that comes to mind is Jarzynski's, "Nonequilibrium Equality for Free Energy Differences". Same journal, same length. Incredibly influential.
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