Wolfram Notebooks on the Web

We’ve been working towards it for many years, but now it’s finally here: an incredibly smooth workflow for publishing Wolfram Notebooks to the web—that makes possible a new level of interactive publishing and computation-enabled communication.

You create a Wolfram Notebook—using all the power of the Wolfram Language and the Wolfram Notebook system—on the desktop or in the cloud. Then you just press a button to publish it to the Wolfram Cloud—and immediately anyone anywhere can both read and interact with it on the web.

It’s an unprecedentedly easy way to get rich, interactive, computational content onto the web. And—together with the power of the Wolfram Language as a computational language—it promises to usher in a new era of computational communication, and to be a crucial driver for the development of “computational X” fields. Continue reading

Today my latest book is published: Adventures of a Computational Explorer.

From the preface:

“You work so hard… but what do you do for fun?” people will ask me. Well, the fact is that I’ve tried to set up my life so that the things I work on are things I find fun. Most of those things are aligned with big initiatives of mine, and with products and companies and scientific theories that I’ve built over decades. But sometimes I work on things that just come up, and that for one reason or another I find interesting and fun.

This book is a collection of pieces I’ve written over the past dozen years on some of these things, and the adventures I’ve had around them. Most of the pieces I wrote in response to some particular situation or event. Their topics are diverse. But it’s remarkable how connected they end up being. And at some level all of them reflect the paradigm for thinking that has defined much of my life.

It all centers around the idea of computation, and the generality of abstraction to which it leads. Whether I’m thinking about science, or technology, or philosophy, or art, the computational paradigm provides both an overall framework and specific facts that inform my thinking. And in a sense this book reflects the breadth of applicability of this computational paradigm. Continue reading

The Story of Rule 30

How can something that simple produce something that complex? It’s been nearly 40 years since I first saw rule 30—but it still amazes me. Long ago it became my personal all-time favorite science discovery, and over the years it’s changed my whole worldview and led me to all sorts of science, technology, philosophy and more.

But even after all these years, there are still many basic things we don’t know about rule 30. And I’ve decided that it’s now time to do what I can to stimulate the process of finding more of them out. So as of today, I am offering $30,000 in prizes for the answers to three basic questions about rule 30. Continue reading