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| 5/25 |
| 2004/3/19-20 [Computer/Theory] UID:12751 Activity:low |
3/18 I have a question for you theoretical CS types out there. Has Stephen
Wolfram ever actually contributed anything significant to the field
of cellular automata?
\_ Were you listening to Berkeley Groks too? Wasn't he just
describing CS?
\_ I don't think so. It seems like he tried to take the concept and
apply it to life, the universe, and everything, while being pompous.
\_ When Wolfram was a physicist at Caltech, he did a bunch of
pioneering work in CA (early '80s).
\_ you must be talking about his already refuted, self-published
tome
\- stephan wolfram vs. william kahan in 10evans was one of the
high point of the last century. --psb
\_ high points of the 20th century? okey dokey! maybe you
lived in a different 20th century from the rest of us.
\_ were you there at kahan wolfram 1? i can't speak to
the entire 20th century, but it certainly was one
of the high points of my life. was there ever a
kahan wolfram 2?
\_ don't get out much huh?
\_ What happened?
\_ Partha, for the benefit of mankind, would you describe it?
I am very interested, having been a student of Kahn and
a customer of Wolfram.
\_ i assume he is talking about this:
http://tinyurl.com/2vlae
\- this misses the 1+1 = 3 part. --psb
which doesn't really seem like any sort of highlight
except for flamemongers i guess.
\_ wow! that sure is cool. and to think I was all
excited about the fall of the Berlin Wall and
Communism. What a fool I was for missing out on
the really important historical events.
\_ i take it this means you were not physically
present.
\_ unless someone got stabbed while screaming,
"oh contraire, mon frere!" it isn't important.
\_ Are you talking about A_New_Kind_Of_Science? Have you
read it? |
| 5/25 |
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| tinyurl.com/2vlae -> forums.wolfram.com/mathgroup/archive/1991/Mar/msg00019.html Wolfram came prepared with a Mac-II hooked up to a color video projector, and talked while typing into various Mathematica notebooks. Wolfram discussed the history of the subject that is, how Wolfram used to write large and small programs and decided that he should write a system to make the writing of programs easier. He then demonstrated various aspects of the Mathematica 20 system. Highlights were, to me, a the inclusion in notebooks of nicely digitized title pages and some contents of various books Abramowitz & Stegun, Gradsteyn and Ryzhek; Hype: the statement that large tables of integrals would need CD ROMs and therefore algorithms that could do 75 of the largest tables were either equivalent or better. Truth: the largest tables of integrals are less than 1 megabyte of ascii characters. But the accuracy of Mma for integration - even representing the contents of the tables, much less replacing them, seems open to doubt. Representation of special conditions on parameters is a particular weak point in Mma. Many erroneous integrals have been found to result from deep-seated incorrect assumptions in Mma. Hype: the Mma number system is conservative and helps keep track of the loss of accuracy. Truth: sometimes the accuracy claimed has no relation whatsoever to the accuracy of the computation. Hype: Mathematica has broken new ground and far surpasses its predecessors, namely Fortran, Cobol, and perhaps Pascal and Lisp. Kahan then asked SW to type the same expression but with r instead of 3. With such a substitution, PowerExpand in Mma 20 reduces the expression for arbitrary r and x, to 1. Kahan said that he thought Mma was deficient in its capabilities with respect to manipulation because it was devoid of semantics - ranges for variables, for example, and that pattern matching was an inadequate technique for doing mathematics. |