Wolfram Science

Live Experiment Notebooks

The notebooks from Stephen Wolfram's live experiment at NKS 2007 last night are now available!

Download NKS2007-LiveExperiment-01.nb (76.0K)
Download NKS2007-LiveExperiment-02.nb (5124.2K)
(Right-click and select "Save Target As" or "Save Link As")

Stephen explored various interesting properties of ECA rules 18, 22 and 122.

Keynote Transcript Now Available

The transcript of Stephen Wolfram's Opening Keynote for NKS 2007 is now available online. You can also find a link in the NKS 2007 sidebar to the left.

Stephen Wolfram: Opening Keynote

The opening talk of the conference, Stephen discusses the current state of NKS, where it will go in the future and how to get there:

May 14th, 2007 was the 5th anniversary of the publication of A New Kind Of Science.

Interest in NKS continues to grow: This year also graduated the 5th class of the NKS Summer School, which continues to produce very interesting NKS projects and research by great minds in a wide variety of fields. There's also a growing body of papers and journal articles on NKS research, as well as increasing interest and programs at academic institutions.

There is still a tendency in NKS towards "model engineering", wherein traditional engineering and scientific methods are used to build up models. NKS provides a new way to build models, though: simply define the properties that a model should have, and search for models that have the desired properties. In this way, in the future more NKS research will come from mining the computational universe, and not from traditional methods.

How can we make sure that NKS achieves its potential?

Tools: Clearly Mathematica 6 brings a range of new tools to NKS research. In particular, the computable data collections allow easy integration of organized, useful real-world data into computations, bringing them to a whole new level. To an even greater extent, the ability to create interactive computation opens many doors as a new form of scientific communication. These and other new tools make it possible to do live experiments: original science in front of a live audience.

Education Initiatives: Stephen created the first journal and the first research institute about NKS techniques. The next few years will bring more formalization of NKS in college curriculum, as interest in academia continues to build. The NKS Summer School is another avenue to build interest in NKS.

Research Prizes: On the 5th anniversary of the NKS book, Stephen announced the first NKS-related research prize: Prove whether a particular 2-state, 3-color Turing Machine is universal or not. The prize has already generated much activity on both sides of the question. Prizes like this will help to popularize NKS ideas and techniques.

As Stephen said in closing:

We are on the cusp of the energetic phase when NKS becomes a coherent force in the world.

Live Computer Experiment by Stephen Wolfram

Posted by Joe Bolte

After the Q&A, Stephen Wolfram performed a live computer experiment from scratch. He chose to search for complex behavior in a class of systems called step registers. Starting from a blank Mathematica notebook, Wolfram generated a ruleset and combed through it for examples of complex behavior, first using a two-neighbor rule and then a three-nighbor rule. You can see that in the two-neighbor case rules 6 and 9 yielded complex behavior and in the three-nieghbor case, rules 90 and 165 were the interesting results. Wolfram had an intuition that rules 90 displayed additive behavior, but he was not able to demonstrate anything before time ran out. Please take a look at the Mathematica notebook of the experiment.

Update: Christopher Haydock noted a problem with the notebook and submitted a corrected version, with the code extensively refactored to be clearer for those following along at home. Thanks Chris!

8:30 a.m. Q&A with Stephen Wolfram & 9:30 a.m. Live Computer Experiment by Stephen Wolfram

Posted by Kathryn Cramer.

Being a bit under the weather, I am letting this morning's program just wash over me rather than trying intensely to write notes that could be published as a blog post by the time the presenter finishes. So I won't try to give too specific an account of the Q. & A. with Stephen Wolfram. The discussion was wide-ranging, pleasant, and low-key.

And as I write this, Wolfram is doing live CA experiments using Mathematica with occasional comments and suggestions from the audience. Because this is live on stage rather than prepared, every once in a while Wolfram will utter amusing lines like, "That's in the category of totally wrong" about the results of something he just tried, or "165 looks quite wild and he deserves further investigation."

A Podcast of Stephen Wolfram's Keynote Adderess is now available

You can listen HERE.

Stephen Wolfram's Keynote Address Now Available Online

His Keynote begins:

I'm pleased to be with you all here today. I think this is going to be a very interesting three days.

Read the rest of it HERE.

MEANWHILE, there is a bit about the conference by Ivars Peterson at blog.sciencenews.org.

Exciting Announcements at the Keynote Address

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.

Stephen Wolfram's Keynote Address: "The core of NKS is exploring the computational universe."

Posted by Kathryn Cramer.

Stephen Wolfram gave a wide-ranging Keynote Address that touched on many (or perhaps even all) of the subjects of the papers to be presented at the conference.

The central organizing metaphor of the talk was the field of NKS as an exploration of the computational universe: The core of NKS is exploring the computational universe.

My favorite line from the talk, from the portion in which he discussed NKS and aesthetics is: We are seeing the beauty of nature but not just from our world, but from all possible worlds.

As I was listening to his talk I explored the relationship between the various items on the program today. Here is my first draft version of this. As I listen to the talks I will modify and improve upon this.

Larger versions of the graphic are available here: 1024 x 642 and 3869 x 2424.

The talk will be available later. We will post the URL when we have it.

Good Morning and welcome to NKS2006!

Posted by Kathryn Cramer.

Good morning. I'm blogging live from my well-appointed hotel room at the Fairmont in Washington, DC. NKS2006 starts this morning with the all-day NKS mini-course by the Wolfram Science staff, plus a reception this evening, where art inspired by NKS will be on display.

I got here yesterday and have been taking the hotel services for a test drive in advance. The Fairmont found me a very nice babysitter named Hazel whom I will be using for the duration of the conference. Also, they told me how to get a nearby rental car which I used to take the kids on an excursion to Chesapeake Bay yesterday. I have also pretested the hotel bar and the Juniper restaurant: pleasantly quiet, good food and drink priced as you would expect for a hotel like this.

My sister and her husband came over yesterday evening with their kids: I'm told the hotel pool is very nice, though lacking much of a shallow end for small children and that their pizza ordered from room service arrived about when room service said it would (within about 35 minutes).

A bit after 9, I encountered Stephen Wolfram in the elevator who said he expected we would all have a lot of fun this weekend.