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The Story About Stephen Wolfram The Physicist Turned a Successful Entrepreneur THE STORY ABOUT STEPHEN WOLFRAM by Gennaro Cuofano FourWeekMBA.com Wolfram Alpha: The Physicist Turned a Successful Entrepreneur - The Four-Week MBA Wolfram Alpha: The Physicist Turned a Successful Entrepreneur Why Wolfram Alpha? Among my passions, I love to check financial data about companies I like. Recently I was looking for a quick way to get reliable financial information for comparative analyses. At the same time, I was looking for shortcuts to perform that analysis. I was researching for myself. I thought why waste so much time on scraping financial reports? While surfing the web, I was looking for a solution and a term popped to my eyes “computational engine.” Wolfram Alpha! That search opened me a universe I wasn’t aware of. Yet that universe wasn’t only about a fantastic tool I learned to use in several ways. I found out the most amazing entrepreneurial story. That is how I jumped in and researched as much as I could about this topic! Why is this story so remarkable? Imagine a kid that as many others, is struggling at arithmetic. Imagine that same kid at 12 years old building a physics dictionary and by the age of 14 drafting three books about particle physics. A few years later at 23, that kid, now a man gets awarded as a prodigious physicist. We could stop this story here, and it would be already one of the most incredible stories you’ll ever hear. Yet this is only the beginning. In fact, what if I told you, that same person turned into a successful entrepreneur, which built several companies and a whole new science from scratch! (Let’s save some details for later) That isn’t only the story of Wolfram Alpha, a tool that I learned to use and cherish. That is the story of one of the smartest people of our century, a shrewd entrepreneur, and polymath, which turned to influence and being influenced by people like Steve Jobs and Benoit Mandelbrot. This is the story of Stephen Wolfram. Writing this post for me has been a pleasure and torture. On the one hand, I jumped into Stephen Wolfram‘s videos, books, and articles. The more I found out, the more I wanted to know. It was an endless loop. However, the unbounded intelligence of Stephen Wolfram is such that trying to circumscribe it in one post, it is like trying to close the universe in a box. Yet more than a post this is an e-book, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it! Before we get to the practical matters related to Wolfram Alpha, I deconstructed his life and ideas. The Quest to Unfold Complexity: who is Stephen Wolfram? Because, after all that’s what technology is all about: setting up systems to achieve human purposes Stephen Wolfram in Computation and the Future of the Human Condition Stephen Wolfram is the founder of Wolfram Alpha, a powerful computational engine (more about what a computational engine is later on). Yet the path that brought Stephen Wolfram to the launch of its latest creature looked more like a life-long quest. Born in London in 1959. Stephen Wolfram showed incredible qualities since a young age. In fact, by age 15 he had drafted three physics books and his first scientific paper. By the age of 21, he had received an important fellowship, which launched him on a life-long quest: understanding complex systems by stripping out their complexity. Yet Stephen Wolfram approach was unique for a couple of reasons, I believe. First, he understood that computation was the most compelling discovery of the past century. Therefore, he focused since the beginning of using machines to enhance human abilities. Second, he believed that to understand complexity he had to look at natural processes to find the most essential programs that mother nature used by time to time to run the show of life. Yet Stephen Wolfram didn’t spend his life as a hermit (except when, for practical purposes, he had to put together a book, which would become a New Kind of Science) or isolated from the world. Instead, he understood the importance of more practical matters, such as managing people. The quest to complexity started from the study of cellular automata, which launched him to formulating a computing theory of everything. So, what are cellular automata? Computing a theory of everything So I want to talk today about an idea. It’s a big idea. Actually, I think it’ll eventually be seen as probably the single biggest idea that’s emerged in the past century. It’s the idea of computation. Now, of course, that idea has brought us all of the computer technology we have today and so on. But there’s actually a lot more to computation than that. It’s really a very deep, very powerful, very fundamental idea, whose effects we’ve only just begun to see. Stephen Wolfram TED Talk Cellular automata are programs that follow simple deterministic rules but show complex behaviors, the more steps they take along their evolution. What does that mean and what makes them so valuable from a scientific standpoint? Imagine starting playing a game with fundamental and straightforward rules. Chances are you’ll start projecting yourself at the end of the game, foreseeing a particular scenario. However, as much as you would love to imagine, even if you had Albert Einstein‘s or Salvador Dali’s ability to day-dream you will never manage to foresee the complex behaviors that will arise along the way from those trivial programs. How is that possible that from such simple programs spring up so much complexity of behavior? The answer lies in rule number 30! Let’s dive a bit into it to see how it works. Rule Number 30: simplicity as the mother of all creations The weather has a mind of its own” isn’t such a primitive thing to say: the fluid dynamics of the weather is just as sophisticated as something like a brain Stephen Wolfram, on blogs.scientificamerican.com It probably was the summer of 1985 – as recalled in Idea Makers – when Steve Wolfram stumbled upon something that would leave a mark on his life and guide him toward a life-long quest. What was that? It all started from rule number 30. As someone that found computation as the most important discovery of the past century Stephen Wolfram didn’t waste time doing calculations. Rather he let computers run all the possible programs that could be found in nature, as simple cellular automata and look at what behaviors they would show. That is what happened that summer in 1985. Cellular automata are self- replicating systems showed as a grid of changing cells. Each cell in the grid reacts based on the neighboring cells. In other words, you start from a grid like the one below A simple rule determines whether a cell will be on or off in the next generation based on the configuration of its neighborhood. For instance, if a cell is white, and the one on its left and right are white, then the cell stays white. Instead, if a white cell falls in-between two black cells, then it turns black. And so on for all the possible arrangements. The possible configurations on a grid comprised of three cells as you can see from the red rectangle above are eight. But the possible combinations, given the fact that each cell can be either black or white (in a binary state) can be 256 – 2 ^ 8 (therefore the two possible states, black or white, at the power of the eight possible combinations). We start by letting the cellular automaton take 20 steps, We can see already a more complex behavior so far. Yet nothing exciting. When we start taking additional steps, the more steps we take, the more complexity arises. That is what we get after 100 steps. As you can see the patterns created by a simple cellular automaton starts to become kind of interesting. Source: blog.stephenwolfram.com When in the 1980s Stephen Wolfram observed this kind of behavior he was shocked. That kind of shock that changes your life, the aha moment! In fact, the more steps he let rule 30 take, the more complexity arose out of simple deterministic rules! The fact that simple rules could replicate nature is pretty counter-intuitive, yet quite effective. Cone Snail, Photographer: Richard Ling Cellular Automata Rule 30 Source: artfail.com The most powerful part is that to build such complexity you don’t need a super powerful computer, but only a three-digit number grid that follows super simple rules. Rule number 30 above all, was the beginning of a quest that would lead Stephen Wolfram to formulate a New Kind of Science. It also opens up a new way of thinking, where intelligence isn’t solely a human thing, but it can be found anywhere in nature. Therefore, the complexity arising from our brain isn’t different from what happens in nature. Both are described well by computations. Before we dive more into what would become the principles of Stephen Wolfram‘s book, A New Kind of Science, let’s dive more into his life. Before Wolfram Alpha If you’ve been using the iPhone, chances are you’ve also been using Wolfram Alpha all along. In fact, you may not know it, but your built-in intelligent assistant, Siri, uses Wolfram Alpha‘s API to provide answers to any question.
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