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We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute

writings.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute

#131

Post by poulpy123 »

DantesKite wrote: post #73

Man these are some low-quality comments. You’d think Wolfram was torturing gerbils or something. I don’t mind criticisms of my favorite thinkers. I enjoy watching someone being taken to task in the battle of ideas so to speak, but apparently something about Wolfram just rubs people the wrong way, because they seem to lose the ability to make cogent arguments after reading him. As a simple example of what a healthy di…

Well this blog article is crackpot science. It doesn't matter that Wolfram created Mathematica or that he was a good scientist before. There are many examples of good scientists, even Nobel prizes, that became crackpot scientists.

Science simply doesn't work like that.

Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute

#132

Post by bondarchuk »

pasadenasunset wrote: post #66
anyfactor wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like it was written by a business school undergrad student who regrets not choosing a STEM major and is a subscriber to Lex Fridman, 2 minute paper, veritesium....and now they want to "disrupt" the world with AI research.

The tossout of “open science” and “open tools” without any explanation is a red flag. Translation: “we’re looking for people who might be convinced to work for free if we promise to give some shit away”. Open science is tantamount to Facebook w/data theft for anyone involved at a sub-professional level of name recognition.

Sounds like they will just be publishing their results and tools for free under a permissive license. I can't see very much wrong with that.

Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute

#133

Post by SiempreViernes »

dTal wrote: post #108
throwaway81523 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can give you any number of cellular automata that model our current understanding of quantum physics right now, no problem Ok, I'm interested in seeing something like that. If you have a link, I'll take a look--thanks. (If you're thinking of 't Hooft's, then I know about it, but its predictions are in serious conflict with mainstream physics, from what I understand).

It's not really that interesting. Can you write it in a computer program? Then you can write it in a cellular automata, because many of them are Turing complete: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110#The_proof_of_universa... https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Turing_machine And yes, this is a cheap trick. That's the point. "Porting" our current theories to some new, whacky substrate, peeking at the textbooks all the while,…

As using CA like a substrate is clearly "theory free" in the sense it doesn't impose any restrictions on how calculations should be done, do you concede that CA doesn't actually provide any theory as the OP lamented?

Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute

#134

Post by hobofan »

k8sToGo wrote: post #55

I used Wolfram Alpha a lot while I was in college and liked it a lot. So I am surprised to see the hatred toward this man in the comments. Can anyone enlighten me why he is delusional and why he has lost it?

> Can anyone enlighten me why he is delusional and why he has lost it?

DISCLAIMER: Views not necessarily my own

I think it would be hard to try to pinpoint a single point in time where "he lost it". Stephen Wolfram grew up as a mathematician/physicist wunderkind, so as it's often the case for people that produced highly praised work early in their life, it's hard to transition to a life with humbleness and where output is received with anything else than praise.

In the past he has made a number of outlandish claims that didn't bear fruit (predictably so), to an extent that one would think that only a delusional person could make them.

E.g. he did a lot of work on cellular automata, and wrote a book titled "A new kind of science", in which he predicted that cellular automata would revolutionize all kinds of natural sciences (hint: that didn't happen). He later made similar claims for Wolfram Alpha revolutionizing search engines, and the Wolfram language revolutionizing programming.

Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute

#135

Post by m12k »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #96
m12k wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As rich eccentrics go, I much prefer the ones trying to advance science (like Wolfram) or medicine (like Gates) to the ones just building more superyachts and lobbying corrupt politicians. I don't really understand the animosity toward Stephen Wolfram on HN - has he done something evil or been super rude to someone? Maybe he has a big ego, but I think that's probably true of a lot of - if not most - of the rich and/o…

The issue is he makes a bunch of apparently empty claims about his hypergraph stuff being related to physics. The pictures are pretty and the hypergraph stuff is perhaps interesting in its own right, but with all the hand waving about QM and GR, I looked pretty hard a couple of years ago and couldn't find any explanation of the most familiar QM phenomena like the double slit experiment. It's almost like free associat…

> I looked pretty hard a couple of years ago and couldn't find any explanation of the most familiar QM phenomena like the double slit experiment

I was following links from the OP, and while reading his Wolfram Physics one year update[1] I came across this:

https://www.wolframphysics.org/bulletins/2020/08/a-short-not...

[1] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/04/the-wolfram-phys...

Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute

#136

Post by dchest »

doomrobo wrote: post #68
postingposts wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I do really weird math for unspecified reasons. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/28da/6507acf40f892b95ee61a7... Cellular Automata are, in essence, a type of mathematical function called a “Chaos Map”, aside from the cool name it’s also a WYSIWYG name, a chaos map is a mapping of how a fractal expands or changes across space time. A great example very germane to this site is the Hacker Glider from Conway’s game o…

From your first link: > The digital images can be converted to binary data and encrypted with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). However, the high correlation between adjacent pixels may still be kept after encrypting a digital image without considering the property of digital images. What do you mean by this? It sounds like it’s suggesting that, e.g., the AES-CBC ciphertext of an image has detectable internal corre…

Yeah, this paper is a good representation of the whole "chaos cryptography" theme — snake oil cryptography invented by authors who don't even attempt to study cryptography before producing their bullshit and publishing it in sketchy or generalist, unrelated to cryptography, journals.

In this particular paper:

1. The motivation for "image encryption" is completely wrong, as you pointed out.

2. There is no secret key. The "key" is produced by hashing the image with SHA-256.

3. Claim: "No any useful information can be acquired from encrypted images". Actually: since this is convergent encryption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_encryption, "key" derived from SHA-256 of data), encrypting any two equal images will produce the same ciphertext, globally.

4. Finally, the actual "key" can't be more than 64 bits, since SHA-256(image) is then split into two groups of 32-bit words, which are xored together to produce two key values. Thus, this whole "encryption" scheme is limited to 64-bit security (probably even less than that). We don't even have to analyze the whole "chaos" system they invented to conclude that it's insecure.

Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute

#137

Post by WithinReason »

poulpy123 wrote: post #91
Pilottwave wrote: post #50

Lots of comments about his "arrogance" but i just see someone passionate, judge for yourself! He has three long interviews on Lex Fridmans youtube channel! I greatly enjoyed watching those those. 1:[Stephen Wolfram: Cellular Automata, Computation, and Physics]( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez773teNFYA ) 2:[Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe]( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t1_…

You can be passionate and arrogant.

He didn't seem arrogant to me from the Lex podcasts. He seems to have no problem admitting when he doesn't know something or when he was wrong. Maybe his overuse of the "I" pronoun gives the wrong impression?

Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute

#139

Post by gradschool »

DantesKite wrote: post #73

Man these are some low-quality comments. You’d think Wolfram was torturing gerbils or something. I don’t mind criticisms of my favorite thinkers. I enjoy watching someone being taken to task in the battle of ideas so to speak, but apparently something about Wolfram just rubs people the wrong way, because they seem to lose the ability to make cogent arguments after reading him. As a simple example of what a healthy di…

> Richard Feynman himself frequently collaborated with Wolfram

By way of a historical note relevant to the current topic, there was a funny exchange between Wolfram and Feynman recorded in the collection of Feynman's letters edited by his daughter. Wolfram started a letter with "Dear Feynman", I imagine because English public school boys don't use first names that much, and floated the idea of starting a scientific institute. Feynman replied in a letter starting "Dear Wolfram" that Wolfram was unlikely to succeed in any leadership capacity because he regards normal people as "stupid fools", and therefore should stick to academic work. Feynman's daughter added the editorial comment that Feynman was disproved by Wolfram's subsequent entrepreneurial success.

Re: We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute

#140

Post by taylorius »

a_bonobo wrote: post #49
ALittleLight wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus it's not like Wolfram is taking resources away from other scientists as he is funded from his company. If Wolfram wasn't doing this he'd be CEO'ing his company, there's no cost to the public for Wolfram exploring this and potentially huge gains - though unlikely.

There could be an opportunity costs, researchers working on this could be working on a different problem. Unlikely, but not impossible.

I'm fairly sure Wolfram's researchers are working on it because they are interested, and want to do it.
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