{"id":2749,"date":"2010-11-26T12:48:21","date_gmt":"2010-11-26T20:48:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=2749"},"modified":"2010-11-26T13:06:31","modified_gmt":"2010-11-26T21:06:31","slug":"wolframs-teachings-natural-language-computation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2010\/11\/26\/wolframs-teachings-natural-language-computation\/","title":{"rendered":"Wolfram’s Teachings. Natural Language."},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m thinking about the mathematician\/computer-scientist\/physicist Stephen Wolfram today, as his company just released version 8 of the Mathematica <\/em>program, a multi-faceted mathematics-helper program; it simplifies and solves algebraid equations and generates very nice graphs, among otheg things. Wolfram\u2019s latest wrinkle is that Mathematica <\/em>now (to some extent) understands natural language. So you can ask it, for instance, to draw something for you without having to use the precise Mathematica-language symbolism. Wolfram has a blog post about this, \u201cThe Free-Form Linguistics Revolution in Mathematica<\/a>.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n


\n[Some of today\u2019s photos are partly drawn from a large Thanksgiving Day gathering we went to in the Mission yesterday, organized in part by my son Rudy.]<\/p>\n

Over the years, Wolfram\u2019s had a huge influence on my thinking. Indeed, my 2006 tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul <\/em><\/a>was to a large extent inspired by Wolfram\u2019s even fatter 2002 book, A New Kind of Science<\/a><\/p>\n

As the years go by, I’m a little surprised by how slowly our new ideas seem to be sinking in. It’s as if people never will <\/em>understand that a deterministic system can be unpredictable, and that computer science has pretty well established this as empirical fact. Or that natural systems in particular, being computation universal, are inherently unpredictable. So the media is always furiously casting about for the proximate cause of the latest disaster. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Re. my impatience, Wolfram recently emailed, \u201cIt will come. But I think the bigger the concepts, the longer the time needed for humans to absorb. So we’re mostly just learning that these are in fact big concepts (even though to you and me they now seem pretty obvious)\u2026\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

For today’s post, I thought I\u2019d summarize Wolfram\u2019s tenets once again, drawing on a version that I recently wrote up for my forthcoming autobiography, Nested Scrolls: A Writer\u2019s Life<\/em>. The context of this passage is that I\u2019m recalling my mixed success in proselytizing Wolfram\u2019s teachings, as presented in his New Kind of Science <\/em>book. Some audiences had been actively hostile.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

First of all, Wolfram was arguing that we can think of any natural process as a computation, that is, you can see anything as a deterministic procedure that works out the consequences of some initial conditions. Fine. Instead of saying the world is made of atoms or of curved space or of natural laws, let\u2019s see what happens if we say it\u2019s made of computations. This notion gets some people\u2019s goat, but if you\u2019ve hung around computers a lot, it seems semi-reasonable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Secondly, Wolfram made the point that, by studying cellular automata, he\u2019d learned that there are basically three kinds of computations. The simple ones peter out or repeat themselves. The pseudorandom ones generate a seething mess. And the interesting computations lie in between. They generate patterns that seem to have some kind of structure to them, but they don\u2019t repeat themselves or turn boring.<\/p>\n

This second idea is simply a taxonomic observation about the kinds of things we find in the world. The in-between computations are akin to what we might earlier have called chaotic processes. I myself came to call them \u201cgnarly computations.\u201d\u009d So, if everything is to be a computation, then pretty much all of the interesting patterns in nature and biology are gnarly computations. Fine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Thirdly, Wolfram argued that all gnarly computations are in some sense equally powerful, that is, given enough time and space, any given gnarly computation can in fact emulate any of the others. If everything is an equally-powerful computation, then we\u2019re all in some sense the same.<\/p>\n

Note that a computer doesn\u2019t have to be made of wires and silicon chips in a box. A cloud can emulate an oak tree, a flickering flame can model a human mind, a dripping faucet can behave like the stock market. And we\u2019re not talking about vague, metaphorical resemblances here, we\u2019re talking about mathematically precise bit-for-bit representations. (I wrote about this idea in my recent pair of novels Postsingular <\/a><\/em>and Hylozoic<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

For someone who\u2019d become as steeped in computer science as I had, this third point also seemed reasonable, but outsiders had trouble making sense of it\u2014and in their confusion, many of them grew angry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Fourthly, Wolfram said that gnarly computations are unpredictable in the specific sense that there are no quick short-cut methods for finding out what these kinds of computations will do. The only way, for instance, to really find out what the weather is going to be like tomorrow is to wait twenty-four hours and see. The only way for me to find out what I\u2019m going to put into the final paragraph-sized \u201cscroll\u201d\u009d of Nested Scrolls<\/em> is to finish writing the book.<\/p>\n

Wolfram\u2019s fourth point is very nearly provable on the basis of some well-known theorems from computer science but, again, many scientists don\u2019t like it. They still subscribe to the pipedream of finding some magical tiny theory that will allow them to make quick pencil-and-paper calculations about every aspect of the future. They haven\u2019t taken to heart the essentially chaotic nature of the world. We can\u2019t control; we can\u2019t predict\u2014but even so we can hope to ride the waves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m thinking about the mathematician\/computer-scientist\/physicist Stephen Wolfram today, as his company just released version 8 of the Mathematica program, a multi-faceted mathematics-helper program; it simplifies and solves algebraid equations and generates very nice graphs, among otheg things. Wolfram\u2019s latest wrinkle is that Mathematica now (to some extent) understands natural language. So you can ask it, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2749"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2755,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2749\/revisions\/2755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}