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A World Run with Code

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: A World Run with Code

#61

Post by as300 »

keerthiko wrote: post #59

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 scien…

> 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.

But what if we had certain "compression" abilities that allowed us to simplify the world? Similar to how storing an audio codec lets us massively minimize how much storage we need for music?

Re: A World Run with Code

#62

Post by neuronexmachina »

as300 wrote: post #61
keerthiko wrote: post #59

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 scien…

> 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. But what if we had certain "compression" abilities that allowed us to simplify the world? Similar to how storing an audio codec lets us massively minimize how much storage we need for music?

Or use lossy compression and get quantization noise. The model would probably get pretty weird if you looked at a fine enough detail. ;)

Re: A World Run with Code

#63

Post by keerthiko »

as300 wrote: post #61
keerthiko wrote: post #59

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 scien…

> 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. But what if we had certain "compression" abilities that allowed us to simplify the world? Similar to how storing an audio codec lets us massively minimize how much storage we need for music?

Magical compression algorithms that have amazing compression ratios and amazingly computational cost to reasonably decompress to process the data could theoretically raise the upper bound of a computational world. But compression cannot solve for an unbounded recursion problem in the simulator having to model itself it's model of the world, unless we arrived at an analytical closed-form solution for any prediction rather than relying on any modeling.

Re: A World Run with Code

#64

Post by SirLuxuryYacht »

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…

You might have seen his table analogy for abstractions, where the concept of a table was an abstraction defined by a set of nouns and adjectives. Yes, "make everything computational" because we all have not yet come to understand the abstract world that he is foretelling as well as we understand the word table.

For another analogy, just because you frame a house with one material e.g. wood, doesnt mean that its structurally unsound.

Re: A World Run with Code

#65

Post by new4thaccount »

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…

I read once that a soldier in Russia was supposed to fire off nuclear warheads once when faulty sensors erroneously indicated that America had already done so.

Had the system been a mathematical contract, we would all be dead. Instead, a hero determined sat pondering whether he should do it and then realized the sensors had to have been defective as he wasn't dead yet.

Re: A World Run with Code

#66

Post by yters »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #55
yters wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

His patients realized something was wrong with their perception, unlike a computer.

Re: A World Run with Code

#67

Post by salty_biscuits »

kodz4 wrote: post #54
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…

"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."

Actually a lost bit of maths history is that computation ability was really important, it was just really manual. Think about Gauss doing least squares to find the orbital parameters of Ceres by hand! Then the stories about him being able to multiply large numbers in his head start to make a bit more sense, not just as a parlor trick.

Re: A World Run with Code

#69

Post by new4thaccount »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #10
furyofantares wrote: post #5

As much as I wish Wolfram would dial back the egocentric tone in places, this is overall an excellent read

I wish he'd cite sources rather than implying by omission that everything is his idea. There's a reason A New Kind of Science was self-published.

I borrowed it once from a friend and after reading a few chapters felt that it was mostly a chapter of smoke and mirrors surrounded by something that was already known and could be explained far more succinctly. The Amazon reviews showed that others felt the same.

Wolfram is brilliant, but I'd rather read a book from him that showed him solving all sorts of neat problems.

Re: A World Run with Code

#70

Post by hinkley »

bitwize wrote: post #60
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-ne…

It's very hard to teach someone whose cup is full. Very smart people can rationalize their bad ideas faster than other people can talk them out of them. But that doesn't mean you've actually explained yourself. If you can't explain things to other people, do you really understand it yourself?

At this point Wolfram is lost to us. "What the hell are you talking about, Steve?". I was just fantasizing about resurrecting Richard Feynman and having him ask Wolfram this question but it turns out I don't have to:

In a letter from Richard Feynman to Stephen Wolfram:

> You don’t understand "ordinary people." To you they are "stupid fools" - so you will not tolerate them or treat their foibles with tolerance or patience - but will drive yourself wild (or they will drive you wild) trying to deal with them in an effective way.

> Find a way to do your research with as little contact with non-technical people as possible, with one exception, fall madly in love! That is my advice, my friend.

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