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New version of Mathematica released

blog.wolfram.com

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Re: New version of Mathematica released

#11

Post by xtacy »

spitfire wrote: post #7

I'm a little disappointed by the opencl/cuda support. I was hoping they'd be fully integrated with native algorithms in mma. Instead you need to change your code to call CUDAfft[] or whatnot. It should just choose the right fft to use, or supply a checkbox in preferences.

Mathematica programming language is somewhat symbolic, like Lisp; so you could just "rewrite" your expressions to use CUDAfft[] or whatever very easily.

Example:

  Hold[Times[1,2]] /. (Times -> Plus)

Re: New version of Mathematica released

#12

Post by lkozma »

tumult wrote: post #9

Can anyone knowledgeable here speak about statistics offer some advice? I'm about to get into a project where, for the first time, I'll need to do some statistics processing and visualization. I haven't started on that component of it yet, and I'm free to choose whatever tool I want. Most of the rest of my project is in Haskell, but for the processing/visualization of statistics part, I was thinking of choosing R. Do…

I think Mathematica is more useful for symbolic processing. For crunching large matrices of numbers and making some plots, R is probably best and/or Matlab (or the free Octave). It depends mostly on which programming paradigm you are more comfortable with.

Re: New version of Mathematica released

#13

Post by earl »

tumult wrote: post #9

Can anyone knowledgeable here speak about statistics offer some advice? I'm about to get into a project where, for the first time, I'll need to do some statistics processing and visualization. I haven't started on that component of it yet, and I'm free to choose whatever tool I want. Most of the rest of my project is in Haskell, but for the processing/visualization of statistics part, I was thinking of choosing R. Do…

Just use R -- the stats support is IMO the best in the world and it has very high adoption amongst stats grad departments and practitioners of statistics. The visualization tools work well -- I've written about basic plotting tools, but if you're just starting in R, skip the built in plotting tools and just use ggplot2. It allows you to build astounding graphics.

Of course, any of this is a time investment, but I'd say the only alternative is Matlab - S-plus is stupidly expensive and no better than R, Stata is a pain for any sort of automated processing, SAS is overpriced by an order of magnitude with a hideous learning curve for functionality that lags 10 years behind R, and Mathematica is brand new to the market. Let someone else work out the kinks.

Re: New version of Mathematica released

#14

Post by mayanklahiri »

greattypo wrote: post #10
tumult wrote: post #9

Can anyone knowledgeable here speak about statistics offer some advice? I'm about to get into a project where, for the first time, I'll need to do some statistics processing and visualization. I haven't started on that component of it yet, and I'm free to choose whatever tool I want. Most of the rest of my project is in Haskell, but for the processing/visualization of statistics part, I was thinking of choosing R. Do…

R has some basic visualization libraries. The graphs are overall very functional, but basic. Ex: http://www.statmethods.net/advgraphs/images/splotm.png Alternatives like Matlab, Maple, Stata all have basically the same 'look' to their default graphing packages. Even though Mathematica would not be the right choice for statistical processing, the graphs it produces are a step above the rest. So depends what you're use…

> R has some basic visualization libraries

If you include CRAN packages, then this couldn't be further from the truth: http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/

R can be made to produce beautiful visualizations.

Edit: here's a link to the top-voted thumbnails of R visualization: http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/thumbs.php?sort=votes

IMO, since it can be scripted from the command line, it's high time Gnuplot died a graceful death.

Re: New version of Mathematica released

#15

Post by zitterbewegung »

anigbrowl wrote: post #6

Looks decent - I'll certainly try the demo. Though I'm no mathematician Mathematica is my favorite Maths playground software. I'm curious about their implementation of NLP. This has enormous potential as a teaching tool - the biggest hurdle to getting more out of a package like this on first use is not knowing how to interact with it. However, I had had similar expectations of Alpha, and was greatly disappointed. tho…

Only problem with that is the fact that Microsoft could either retool the kinect to disallow the use by mathematica. Some other third party would have to work similar to kinect for it to actually happen.

Re: New version of Mathematica released

#17

Post by dehowell »

anigbrowl wrote: post #6

Looks decent - I'll certainly try the demo. Though I'm no mathematician Mathematica is my favorite Maths playground software. I'm curious about their implementation of NLP. This has enormous potential as a teaching tool - the biggest hurdle to getting more out of a package like this on first use is not knowing how to interact with it. However, I had had similar expectations of Alpha, and was greatly disappointed. tho…

I bet this will be possible whenever a PC driver for Kinect becomes available:

http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/ControllerManip...

About a year ago, I was working on a machine learning problem. I had a lot of training data I wanted to manually classify, so I put together a Mathematica interface for the data that would let me browse the training set and assign classifications from a USB gamepad. It was pretty straightforward... only took an hour or two to implement, and it sure beat classifying with mouse clicks!

Re: New version of Mathematica released

#18

Post by tzs »

drallison wrote: post #16

Home edition (hobbiest, non-commercial): $295 Professional edition: $1095 (Windows, MAC, Linux) An amazing product, IMHO.

Professional is still $2500 for me. Someone on Reddit reported seeing the $1095 price in Firefox and the $2500 price in Chrome.

Re: New version of Mathematica released

#19

Post by dagw »

thebooktocome wrote: post #5

Eh. I'm a graduate student in mathematics, and it unless a problem is more or less trivial, it takes too long to force Mathematica to do what I mean. Also I agree with a poster below: this press release is really low on the signal-to-noise.

Personally I use Mathematica as a sketchpad for playing around with ideas and getting a feel for a problem. It is great because I can type in my sloppy half thought out ideas in a fairly natural syntax and Mathematica will generally do something sensible with them. Once I've gotten a handle on what I need to do and actually have to start getting results I leave Mathematica for matlab, python or C.

That being said I've met some really great Mathematica programmers, and the stuff they can make that program do with only a few dozen lines of code is truly amazing.

Re: New version of Mathematica released

#20

Post by anigbrowl »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #15
anigbrowl wrote: post #6

Looks decent - I'll certainly try the demo. Though I'm no mathematician Mathematica is my favorite Maths playground software. I'm curious about their implementation of NLP. This has enormous potential as a teaching tool - the biggest hurdle to getting more out of a package like this on first use is not knowing how to interact with it. However, I had had similar expectations of Alpha, and was greatly disappointed. tho…

Only problem with that is the fact that Microsoft could either retool the kinect to disallow the use by mathematica. Some other third party would have to work similar to kinect for it to actually happen.

That's true, but I doubt they will - and if they do, hordes of imitators will appear. My hunch (ie I have no evidence whatsoever for this) is that MS's huffing and puffing over people's reverse engineering of the Kinect was little more than posturing designed to increase viral interest. If they really wanted to keep it limited to the Xbox they'd have forced a proprietary connector to one of the memory expansion slots or such, rather than giving it USB 2 and acting surprised when people tried plugging it into other devices.

Intentional or not, it's having a good launch - word is that it's flying off shelves, and seems to have instant mass appeal. I was at an information management technology conference a week ago, and guess which two booths were the most crowded? The ones that were trading 3 minutes of sales pitching for a go at Dance Dance Revolution or whatever the Kinect version is called. Incidentally, the other thing being used to bribe jaded conference-goers was the prospect of winning an iPad every hour - there must have been 30 exhibitors using that one.

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