Posted by Joe Bolte
After the day-long NKS mini-course, the 2006 NKS Conference kicked off this morning with an address by Stephen Wolfram. Since he was now addressing people who were already familiar with basic ideas of NKS, Wolfram covered the state of the art of our research, what new directions it was moving in, and what kinds of new tools we could expect from Wolfram Research.
He started by saying that although the activity in the NKS world might seem slow to people who were deeply involved in its development, it had only been four years since the public introduction of the NKS book, and the pace of adoption was consistent with, and even faster than other historical examples of major scientific revolutions. Every day, several papers are publsihed that involve methods he pioneered and the quality of this work has been increasing steadily. A few years ago, articles in Science and Nature had little to do with complex systems and simple programs, but now they are clearly moving in an NKS direction. In fact, many papers mention the kind of ideas he has been promoting for years, even though some authors seem unaware of the theoretical framework that he had already put in place.
The coverage of the relation of NKS to traditional scientific fields was complicated and fascinating, so I'll hold those out for separate posts and move on to two very exciting announcements that Wolfram mentioned close to the end of the talk. One is that he has moved from his "book-writing hermitage" and resumed a more active role in building research tools. It sounds like a major new version of Mathematica is on the way, which will be far ahead of the already unparalleled tools for studying simple programs in Mathematica 5.2 Hopefully as the conference progresses, we'll have more tidbits about the capabilities we can expect from Mathematica in the future.
The other announcement was that Dr. Wolfram is so keen on seeing practical applications of the theoretical ideas he and others are developing that Wolfram Research is interested in finding ways to support business models based around NKS. This could possibly come in the form of angel investment, NKS consulting services, or computer and legal infrastructure. The news that Wolfram Research will become even more actively involved in supporting other research efforts must be tremendously exciting to many people at the conference who are broadening and applying the foundation laid down by Wolfram's New Kind of Science over the past 25 years.
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