In 2020 it was Versions 12.1 and 12.2; in 2021 Versions 12.3 and 13.0. In late June this year it was Version 13.1. And now we’re releasing Version 13.2. We continue to have a huge pipeline of R&D, some short term, some medium term, some long term (like decade-plus). Our goal is to deliver timely snapshots of where we’re at—so people can start using what we’ve built as quickly as possible. Continue reading
Last week it was 34 years since the original launch of Mathematica and what’s now the Wolfram Language. And through all those years we’ve energetically continued building further and further, adding ever more capabilities, and steadily extending the domain of the computational paradigm.
In recent years we’ve established something of a rhythm, delivering the fruits of our development efforts roughly twice a year. We released Version 13.0 on December 13, 2021. And now, roughly six months later, we’re releasing Version 13.1. As usual, even though it’s a “.1” release, it’s got a lot of new (and updated) functionality, some of which we’ve worked on for many years but finally now brought to fruition. Continue reading
“We’re going to launch lots of tiny spacecraft into interstellar space, have them discover alien intelligence, then bring back its technology to advance human technology by a million years”. I’ve heard some pretty wacky startup pitches over the years, but this might possibly be the all-time winner.
But as I thought about it, I realized that beyond the “absurdly extreme moonshot” character of this pitch, there’s some science that I’ve done that makes it clear that it’s also fundamentally philosophically confused. The nature of the confusion is interesting, however, and untangling it will give us an opportunity to illuminate some deep features of both intelligence and technology—and in the end suggest a way to think about the long-term trajectory of the very concept of technology and its relation to our universe.
Let’s start with a scenario. Let’s say one of the little spacecraft comes across a planet where it sees complicated swirling patterns:
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Multicomputation is one of the core ideas of the Wolfram Physics Project—and in particular is at the heart of our emerging understanding of quantum mechanics. But how can one get an intuition for what is initially the rather abstract idea of multicomputation? A good approach, I believe, is to see it in action in familiar systems and situations. And I explore here what seems like a particularly good example: games and puzzles. Continue reading
When A New Kind of Science was published twenty years ago I thought what it had to say was important. But what’s become increasingly clear—particularly in the last few years—is that it’s actually even much more important than I ever imagined. My original goal in A New Kind of Science was to take a step beyond the mathematical paradigm that had defined the state of the art in science for three centuries—and to introduce a new paradigm based on computation and on the exploration of the computational universe of possible programs. And already in A New Kind of Science one can see that there’s immense richness to what can be done with this new paradigm. Continue reading
In the end it’s about five and a half pounds of paper, 1280 pages, 973 illustrations and 583,313 words. And its creation took more than a decade of my life. Almost every day of my thirties, and a little beyond, I tenaciously worked on it. Figuring out more and more science. Developing new kinds of computational diagrams. Crafting an exposition that I wrote and rewrote to make as clear as possible. And painstakingly laying out page after page of what on May 14, 2002, would be published as A New Kind of Science.
I’ve written before (even in the book itself) about the intellectual journey involved in the creation of A New Kind of Science. But here I want to share some of the more practical “behind the scenes” journey of the making of what I and others usually now call simply “the NKS book”. Some of what I’ll talk about happened twenty years ago, some more like thirty years ago. And it’s been interesting to go back into my archives (and, yes, those backup tapes from 30 years ago were hard to read!) and relive some of what finally led to the delivery of the ideas and results of A New Kind of Science as truckloads of elegantly printed books with striking covers. Continue reading
Something remarkable has happened these past two years. For 45 years I’ve devoted myself to building a taller and taller tower of science and technology—which along the way has delivered many outputs of which I’m quite proud. But starting in 2020 with the unexpected breakthroughs of our Wolfram Physics Project we’ve jumped to a whole new level. And suddenly—yes, building on our multi-decade tower—it seems as if we’ve found a new paradigm that’s incredibly powerful, and that’s going to let us tackle an almost absurd range of longstanding questions in all sorts of areas of science.
Developing a fundamental theory of physics is certainly an ambitious place to start, and I’m happy to say that things seem to be going quite excellently there, not least in providing new foundations for many existing results and initiatives in physics. But the amazing (and to me very unexpected) thing is that we can take our new paradigm and also apply it to a huge range of other areas. Just a couple of weeks ago I published a 250-page treatise about its application to the “physicalization of metamathematics”—and to providing a very new view of the foundations of mathematics (with implications both for the question of what mathematics really is, and for the practical long-term future of mathematics). Continue reading
It seems like the kind of question that might have been hotly debated by ancient philosophers, but would have been settled long ago: how is it that things can move? And indeed with the view of physical space that’s been almost universally adopted for the past two thousand years it’s basically a non-question. As crystallized by the likes of Euclid it’s been assumed that space is ultimately just a kind of “geometrical background” into which any physical thing can be put—and then moved around.
But in our Physics Project we’ve developed a fundamentally different view of space—in which space is not just a background, but has its own elaborate composition and structure. And in fact, we posit that space is in a sense everything that exists, and that all “things” are ultimately just features of the structure of space. We imagine that at the lowest level, space consists of large numbers of abstract “atoms of space” connected in a hypergraph that’s continually getting updated according to definite rules and that’s a huge version of something like this:
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One of the many surprising (and to me, unexpected) implications of our Physics Project is its suggestion of a very deep correspondence between the foundations of physics and mathematics. We might have imagined that physics would have certain laws, and mathematics would have certain theories, and that while they might be historically related, there wouldn’t be any fundamental formal correspondence between them.
But what our Physics Project suggests is that underneath everything we physically experience there is a single very general abstract structure—that we call the ruliad—and that our physical laws arise in an inexorable way from the particular samples we take of this structure. We can think of the ruliad as the entangled limit of all possible computations—or in effect a representation of all possible formal processes. And this then leads us to the idea that perhaps the ruliad might underlie not only physics but also mathematics—and that everything in mathematics, like everything in physics, might just be the result of sampling the ruliad. Continue reading
Just a few weeks ago it was 1/3 of a century since Mathematica 1.0 was released. Today I’m excited to announce the latest results of our long-running R&D pipeline: Version 13 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica. (Yes, the 1, 3 theme—complete with the fact that it’s the 13th of the month today—is amusing, if coincidental.)
It’s 207 days—or a little over 6 months—since we released Version 12.3. And I’m pleased to say that in that short time an impressive amount of R&D has come to fruition: not only a total of 117 completely new functions, but also many hundreds of updated and upgraded functions, several thousand bug fixes and small enhancements, and a host of new ideas to make the system ever easier and smoother to use.
Every day, every week, every month for the past third of a century we’ve been pushing hard to add more to the vast integrated framework that is Mathematica and the Wolfram Language. And now we can see the results of all those individual ideas and projects and pieces of work: a steady drumbeat of innovation sustained now over the course of more than a third of a century:
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