Headlines and History

The headlines keep coming: such and such an AI system has solved such and such a math problem. And more and more I’m hearing people saying: maybe we don’t need people doing math research anymore; maybe we should just delegate it all to more and more powerful AIs.

I must admit that I’m getting a bit impatient with some of what’s being said. Because it seems to me too often to involve fundamental misunderstandings of what math is really about—and also, frankly, what AI is about.

Perhaps I have a unique piece of personal history that informs this. After all, back in 1988, when we first introduced Mathematica, there was also some of the same kind of talk about math being taken over, and made pointless. Of course that’s not how it worked out at all. Instead, Mathematica (now Wolfram Language) just raised the level of math that can be done—and over the years led to all sorts of important new math. Continue reading

Something terrible just happened. My wife, Elise Cawley, was recovering from heart surgery and had just attended virtually a celebration for one of our children when she had a freak, vast cardiovascular event—and died instantly. We had been together for 36 years. The picture above was taken just hours before she died.

In all the writing and public speaking I have done, I have chosen, as a matter of privacy, to say little about my family. But now that Elise is gone I cannot restrain myself from telling the world something about the remarkable person with whom I shared the past 36 years of my life.

It was September 17, 1990, and I was in New York City. The event I had been attending finished a little early, so I decided to drop in on a friend of mine. And there, sitting stylishly on the floor, was Elise, a somewhat bashful but obviously brilliant young pure mathematician. It took me a couple of weeks to call her. But from that moment on we talked essentially every day for 36 years—until the day she died a week ago. Continue reading

“My Program Did the Wrong Thing!”

Bugs are a ubiquitous phenomenon in the software world. And—essentially by definition—each one of them is somehow unique and unexpected. But—particularly given their ubiquity—one might wonder whether there could perhaps be some kind of general “scientific” theory that could be developed about them. My goal here is to explore that question. And what we’ll find is that there are indeed foundational ways to think about bugs (and “correct programs”)—using concepts like computational irreducibility (and computational reducibility).

The things we’ll discuss will give us a sense of the fundamental tradeoffs between computational effectiveness and the propensity for bugs—as well as of strategies for the detection of bugs, and expectations about the difficulty of testing. Along the way, we’ll be able to illuminate some underlying issues associated both with software verification and with computer security—as well as about code generated by AI systems. Continue reading

An Impressive Release for Modern Times

June 23, 1988 is when we launched Version 1.0 of Mathematica. Today—almost 38 years later—we’re launching Version 15 of what—in recognition of how far it’s expanded beyond “math”—we now call Wolfram Language. It’s an impressive release, with a lot of new core functionality. It might perhaps seem surprising that after 38 years there’d still be more to add. But it’s like the typical arc of intellectual history: the more one’s figured out, the further one can see, and the more one becomes able to do. And for all of us working on it, it’s been a very satisfying process: year after year building an ever taller tower of ideas and technology, with which we can reach ever further—today to all the functionality of Version 15. Continue reading

The Basic Setup

Whether one’s dealing with biology, economics, politics or a host of other fields, it’s common to encounter situations that can be modeled as involving two agents that repeatedly compete with each other. One imagines that at each step each agent can take one of a certain set of actions, and that then—in a classic game theory way—each agent (or “player”) gets a certain fixed “payoff” based on the action they and their opponent take. But how do the agents decide what action to take? We imagine that each agent has a certain fixed procedure—or “strategy”—for making its decisions. And we imagine that the input to each of those decisions is the sequence of past actions that the agent and its opponent have taken.

There’s been lots of work done over the course of nearly a century on particular choices of strategies. But something I’ve long been curious about is what happens if one systematically considers all possible strategies. And if we think of strategies as programs this becomes a question to which we can immediately apply ruliological methods. Which is what I’m going to do here. Continue reading

Foundation Models Need a Foundation Tool

LLMs don’t—and can’t—do everything. What they do is very impressive—and useful. It’s broad. And in many ways it’s human-like. But it’s not precise. And in the end it’s not about deep computation.

So how can we supplement LLM foundation models? We need a foundation tool: a tool that’s broad and general and does what LLMs themselves don’t: provides deep computation and precise knowledge.

And, conveniently enough, that’s exactly what I’ve been building for the past 40 years! My goal with Wolfram Language has always been to make everything we can about the world computable. To bring together in a coherent and unified way the algorithms, the methods and the data to do precise computation whenever it’s possible. It’s been a huge undertaking, but I think it’s fair to say it’s been a hugely successful one—that’s fueled countless discoveries and inventions (including my own) across a remarkable range of areas of science, technology and beyond. Continue reading

The Wolfram Institute recently received a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation for “Computational Metaphysics”. I wrote this piece in part as a launching point for discussions with experts in traditional philosophy.

Moving Metaphysics from Philosophy to Science

“What ultimately is there?” has always been seen as a fundamental—if thorny—question for philosophy, or perhaps theology. But despite a couple of millennia of discussion, I think it’s fair to say that only modest progress has been made with it. But maybe, just maybe, this is the moment where that’s going to change—and on the basis of surprising new ideas and new results from our latest efforts in science, it’s finally going to be possible to make real progress, and in the end to build what amounts to a formal, scientific approach to metaphysics.

It all centers around the ultimate foundational construct that I call the ruliad—and how observers like us, embedded within it, must perceive it. And it’s a story of how—for observers like us—fundamental concepts like space, time, mathematics, laws of nature, and indeed, objective reality, must inevitably emerge. Continue reading

Empirical Theoretical Computer Science

“Could there be a faster program for that?” It’s a fundamental type of question in theoretical computer science. But except in special cases, such a question has proved fiendishly difficult to answer. And, for example, in half a century, almost no progress has been made even on the rather coarse (though very famous) P vs. NP question—essentially of whether for any nondeterministic program there will always be a deterministic one that is as fast. From a purely theoretical point of view, it’s never been very clear how to even start addressing such a question. But what if one were to look at the question empirically, say in effect just by enumerating possible programs and explicitly seeing how fast they are, etc.?

One might imagine that any programs one could realistically enumerate would be too small to be interesting. But what I discovered in the early 1980s is that this is absolutely not the case—and that in fact it’s very common for programs even small enough to be easily enumerated to show extremely rich and complex behavior. With this intuition I already in the 1990s began some empirical exploration of things like the fastest ways to compute functions with Turing machines. But now—particularly with the concept of the ruliad—we have a framework for thinking more systematically about the space of possible programs, and so I’ve decided to look again at what can be discovered by ruliological investigations of the computational universe about questions of computational complexity theory that have arisen in theoretical computer science—including the P vs. NP question. Continue reading

Ruliology is taking off! And more and more people are talking about it. But what is ruliology? Since I invented the term, I decided I should write something to explain it. But then I realized: I actually already wrote something back in 2021 when I first invented the term. What I wrote back then was part of something longer. But here now is the part that explains ruliology:

If one sets up a system to follow a particular set of simple rules, what will the system do? Or, put another way, how do all those simple programs out there in the computational universe of possible programs behave?

These are pure, abstract questions of basic science. They’re questions one’s led to ask when one’s operating in the computational paradigm that I describe in A New Kind of Science. But at some level they’re questions about the specific science of what abstract rules (that we can describe as programs) do. Continue reading

Scaling Up Your Computations

Let’s say you’ve done a computation in Wolfram Language. And now you want to scale it up. Maybe 1000x or more. Well, today we’ve released an extremely streamlined way to do that. Just wrap the scaled up computation in RemoteBatchSubmit and off it’ll go to our new Wolfram Compute Services system. Then—in a minute, an hour, a day, or whatever—it’ll let you know it’s finished, and you can get its results.

For decades I’ve often needed to do big, crunchy calculations (usually for science). With large volumes of data, millions of cases, rampant computational irreducibility, etc. I probably have more compute lying around my house than most people—these days about 200 cores worth. But many nights I’ll leave all of that compute running, all night—and I still want much more. Well, as of today, there’s an easy solution—for everyone: just seamlessly send your computation off to Wolfram Compute Services to be done, at basically any scale.

For nearly 20 years we’ve had built-in functions like ParallelMap and ParallelTable in Wolfram Language that make it immediate to parallelize subcomputations. But for this to really let you scale up, you have to have the compute. Which now—thanks to our new Wolfram Compute Services—everyone can immediately get. Continue reading