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A World Run with Code

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: A World Run with Code

#51

Post by jwr »

peterlk wrote: post #31
JackFr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find Stephen Wolfram to be a an interesting person. On one hand, he is undeniably exceptional and created an impressive computational system. On the other hand, the "Wolfram language" is really a pretty poor design as far as programming languages go, and would not even be noticed if it wasn't for the giant standard library that gets shipped with it, called Mathematica. I use the "Wolfram language" because I have…

I have worked with a small number of exceptionally talented individuals (I don't know where to draw the "genius" line, but they were up there), and I see negative aspects of their personalities echoed in Stephen Wolfram. It looks like ego to me. People lose their humility after being told that their better than everyone else for their whole lives. Being an expert at one thing doesn't make you an expert at everything.…

I think your last paragraph might be spot-on.

Re: A World Run with Code

#52

Post by saghm »

robbiep wrote: post #41
sktrdie wrote: post #34

To be honest I haven’t understood much of this. Am I also the only one who’s very skeptical of AI? I see no correlation between what we call “biological thinking” and computation. Even though I don’t know much of the theory behind AI, to me it’s similar to saying that since we have lots of simple calculators, we can arrange them together in some specific way and emergent intelligence will arise. Sure yes I mean but y…

https://xkcd.com/505/

Before I clicked, I expected it to be this one: https://xkcd.com/419/

Re: A World Run with Code

#53

Post by jwr »

sciyoshi wrote: post #45
jwr wrote: post #11

I find Stephen Wolfram to be a an interesting person. On one hand, he is undeniably exceptional and created an impressive computational system. On the other hand, the "Wolfram language" is really a pretty poor design as far as programming languages go, and would not even be noticed if it wasn't for the giant standard library that gets shipped with it, called Mathematica. I use the "Wolfram language" because I have to…

Funny, because I think the Wolfram language (also as a long-time user) is actually really well-designed and consistent, and has stood the test of time. Even ignoring the standard library, it has a really expressive syntax for pattern matching and functional programming, and I find that you can often do very complex things with very little code. For doing any kind of symbolic manipulation or lazy evaluation, it's pret…

Really? I found that it's fine when all your data is lists or matrices, but it becomes increasingly terrible if you want to process structured data. Maps (associative) have been added late and in a half-baked way, using them is a pain. The way macros are written is pretty bad syntax-wise. There seems to be little consistency in terms of which arguments come first, so composing functions into pipelines can be awkward. Variables in "With" and "Module" cannot refer to earlier bindings, so I end up with multiple nested With/Module statements. Also, "Module" for lexical scoping, really?

Also, I never managed to achieve any reasonable degree of code reuse in Mathematica. Most of my notebooks are single-purpose.

Re: A World Run with Code

#54

Post by kodz4 »

jwr wrote: post #11

I find Stephen Wolfram to be a an interesting person. On one hand, he is undeniably exceptional and created an impressive computational system. On the other hand, the "Wolfram language" is really a pretty poor design as far as programming languages go, and would not even be noticed if it wasn't for the giant standard library that gets shipped with it, called Mathematica. I use the "Wolfram language" because I have to…

It's quite clear what he is saying. Programming languages are what programmers use. And how programmers think is dominated by how a computer works, which is usually a gigantic distraction to actually solving real world problems.

Newton, Maxwell and Einstein didn't need to waste any of their time thinking about how to use a computer to solve the problems they worked on.

If I ask Google for the 2018 Wimbledon Champ it tells me it has found 47,00,000 results in (0.90 seconds). Take a step back and think about this.

They have their own knowledge graph. They have Wikipedia access. They have the ATP site cached. They have the Wimbledon site cached. But they aren't able to tell the problem being solved doesn't need 4.7 Million results.

This is the kind of mindlessness that happens when the focus is not on the actual problem, but what the computer can do.

Re: A World Run with Code

#55

Post by Viliam1234 »

yters wrote: post #44
raz32dust wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same vein, "Human intelligence" led to the 2008 crash. Human's aren't infallible either. My problem with this argument is that there is no logical basis for how exactly human intelligence is different. Computers aren't there yet in most domains, but there is no evidence to say they can't get there. How soon is anybody's guess right now. While AGI might be far off, I can certainly imagine computers running larg…

Humans don't think kittens are avocados with complete certainty because someone flicked a speck of green paint on the kitten.

Before stating this with complete certainty, I would ask Oliver Sacks first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...

Re: A World Run with Code

#56

Post by 0815test »

daenz wrote: post #15

>Right now, most of what the computers in the world do is to execute tasks we basically initiate. But increasingly our world is going to involve computers autonomously interacting with each other, according to computational contracts. Once something happens in the world—some computational fact is established—we’ll quickly see cascades of computational contracts executing. And there’ll be all sorts of complicated intr…

Different roles. Computational contracts are not about e.g. the "traders" on a security exchange, they're about the exchange institution itself, and the precise definition of how it should work and interact with agents. Behind any sort of "smart market" there's a computational contract of some kind, and the converse may also be true - inasmuch as it interacts with multiple agents who jointly determine the 'prices' involved, a "computational contract" is a smart market, and its usefulness can fairly be assessed as such.

Re: A World Run with Code

#57

Post by gricardo99 »

robbiep wrote: post #40
jerf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"My problem with this argument is that there is no logical basis for how exactly human intelligence is different." I can give you a partial answer, which is that human intelligence is somewhat slower, which mitigates the ability to crash the entire economy in 15 seconds. That's why a stock market can crash in 15 seconds nowadays, but "the housing market" can't. This gives people some time to do some things about it w…

That’s also why there are trading halts built into all major exchanges, so if something triggers a large fall, there is a circuit breaker in the decision process of 18-48 hours for people to process and digest information

Just FYI, NYSE Rule 80B[1] halts trading for 15 minutes, or until the next day if the first 2 levels are breached. CME follows similar rules.

1 - http://wallstreet.cch.com/nyse/rules/nyse-rules/chp_1_3/chp_...

Re: A World Run with Code

#58

Post by exelius »

raz32dust wrote: post #20
daenz wrote: post #15

>Right now, most of what the computers in the world do is to execute tasks we basically initiate. But increasingly our world is going to involve computers autonomously interacting with each other, according to computational contracts. Once something happens in the world—some computational fact is established—we’ll quickly see cascades of computational contracts executing. And there’ll be all sorts of complicated intr…

In the same vein, "Human intelligence" led to the 2008 crash. Human's aren't infallible either. My problem with this argument is that there is no logical basis for how exactly human intelligence is different. Computers aren't there yet in most domains, but there is no evidence to say they can't get there. How soon is anybody's guess right now. While AGI might be far off, I can certainly imagine computers running larg…

The biggest problem with “human intelligence” is that our memory is so short and influenced by emotion. Though judging by the amount of data created and lost over the last decade, that’s probably true of computers too.

Re: A World Run with Code

#59

Post by keerthiko »

I had this thought when I was 13 and first learned the basics of programming "hey dad if everything is determined by physics and chemistry and computers are real good at math can't we analytically deduce the future."

I eventually learned this was just the 13 year old's version of "why's the sky blue?" into "but why is Rayleigh scattering a thing?" and there are several limitations to both human understanding of science, and theoretical computation limits -- a computer to have sufficient accuracy to model the world would by definition need to have as much memory as the world, and model itself in it. I moved on from that idea shortly after learning of that.

Is Stephen Wolfram just an overgrown child? Maybe unironically that's what being a genius is about.

Re: A World Run with Code

#60

Post by bitwize »

neptvn wrote: post #48

Wolfram might be a genius, but I personally find his writing and lectures extremely dull. The only thing he seems to write is how everything is "computational", and how we need to embrace his idea that computing is what the whole universe is about. For example in this blog post alone, we can find this following word count: computer - 19x computation* - 96x computational - 63x Make everything computational! computatio…

Welcome to Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram is madly in love with his own ideas, even when those ideas are not nearly as original or world-shakingly profound as he seems to think they are. That he is a genius does not mean he is not in a state of arrested development; prodigious genius like his can impede one's development because people around the genius are so in awe of them that they are unwilling to give them the much-needed corrections and reality checks it takes to grow.
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