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Science

Stephen Wolfram Radio Lecture 33

Posted by timothy from the stuff-to-stick-in-your-ear dept.
Stephen Wolfram, subject of much discussion here, once known solely as the creator of Mathematica, now also known as the author of A New Kind of Science (/. review here), gave a lecture at Boston University this past spring on that book's subject matter. The audio of the lecture was broadcast this evening on the program World of Ideas on WBUR-FM out of Boston. If you don't live in the Boston area, if you missed the program, or if like me you were listening in your car while driving and found that two activites incompatible, the hour-long recording is also available for download in RealMedia format.
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Stephen Wolfram Radio Lecture More

Stephen Wolfram Radio Lecture

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  • Archive it! (Score:5, Informative)

    by brianjcain ( 622084 ) on Sunday July 13, 2003 @11:52PM (#6431710) Journal
    vsound -t -s realplay $url | \
    sox -t .au - -t .wav - | \
    speexenc --vbr --nframes 4 --quality 7 Wolfram.spx

  • Available for download?? (Score:4, Informative)

    by SN74S181 ( 581549 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @12:06AM (#6431768)
    No, it doesn't appear to be available for download.

    Will somebody please post a link to capture it in a format that will really be playable offline?

  • mp3's available HERE (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 14, 2003 @05:26AM (#6432726)

    Bittorrent mp3s here [82.82.147.245]

    You need of course bittorrent [bitconjurer.org]

  • Hell and damnation! The lecture is inaccessible! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TDDPirate ( 689284 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @09:26AM (#6433286) Journal
    There are several deaf persons in the world, who are interested in Stephen Wolfram's ideas.
    However, as long as the lecture exists only as audio stream, its gems of wisdom will remain forever out of reach of the deaf in the world.

    AARRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!

    • ...not to be insensitive, but... (Score:4, Informative)

      by avi33 ( 116048 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @01:46PM (#6435421) Homepage
      ...at least in this case, I wouldn't say anything is 'out of reach' -- the gems of wisdom imparted in the lecture are available in his 6,000 page book that covers the subject. (ok, maybe 1,200 pages but you get the picture). If you're not familiar with the material, you can get a lot more from reading a critique of the book. If you are familiar, you pretty much sit there and wonder whatever made you think *you* were so smart.

      There is a lot of relevant content on a number of his websites...he kept telling us to read and re-read different sections of the book.

      I saw this lecture in Chicago, and it's not unlike walking off the street into a 400-level physics course. A brilliant professor walks in and immediately gets started, armed with a few powerpoint slides and ultradry jokes, he steamrolls through the first 300 pages of his book in 60 minutes. An audio stream of this isn't going to make or break your understanding on the subject.

      I imagine a sign language translator would have their hands full (so to speak) trying to keep up with him.

  • Here's a Video of his lecture (Score:4, Informative)

    by rochlin ( 248444 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @10:27AM (#6433737) Homepage
    You can watch it on video (he does the same lecture over and over). Here's a link to a realmedia Video

    http://webcast.ucsd.edu:8080/ramgen/UCSD_TV/7153.r m [ucsd.edu]

    That's from the University of California Video archive. Lots of interesting stuff [www.uctv.tv].

  • Can someone explain to me how he decides how many columns to have? Sure cellular automata makes pretty patterns, but is the grid arbitrary?
    • Depending on the rules used to drive the CA, the number of columns could have an effect anywhere between no effect at all, or an effect dependent upon the value modulo some number which is dependent upon the rules.

      In other words, some systems might not be affected by the number of columns at all (for instance, those where the boundaries of the affected CA cells don't expand - these are typically degenerate cases anyway. But another system might produce different behavior if it has 4n columns versus 4n+1,

    • Re:Wrapper? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by asterisk_man ( 18358 )
      My understanding from reading the book and looking at all of the images he includes is that the number of columns is essentially infinite but for obvious reasons only a finite number of columns can be shown at any one time. In the book you will notice that he will show a zoomed in image of a CA with maybe 25 columns and 25 iterations but the zoomed out version of that CA with 100 iterations is shown with 100 columns. Sometimes he also seems to show just a vertical slice of the real CA in order to demonstrat

  • um.. (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The host is done by speech synthesis, right?
  • Rule 30: There is Noooooooo... Rule 30.

  • Been there done that (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rares Marian ( 83629 ) <hshdsgdsgfdsgfdr ... tdkiytdiytdc.org> on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @12:50AM (#6450110) Homepage
    This stuff is like 40 years old. Older than Unix (30 year old OSes are fine, 31 year old ones well...).

    I used to create two colonies of cells which after a certain modification would start firing moving structures at each other destroying each others sections. Sometimes bridges were built. I had one where cells seemed to patrol the border like a marquee (in reality they weren't moving, the cells simply progressed in the same decaying states). For the majority of situations, these patrols prevented incoming bodies from destroying the structures they were seemingly protecting.

    We don't need a new kind of science. We need a level playing field that allows anyone to research without the kind of elitism that infuriates just the kind of people that cause independent groups to degenerate into cliques and feuds often found in the Free Energy, Cold Fusion, and Perpetual Machine cults.

    We need a new approach at problem solving. Running a hundred experiments that make no new predictions is not science. Show me a laptop powered by water and I'll drop a dime into the donation cup.

    If anything this stuff simply says that when things change they may stay the same. We program using code that behaves the same way at all times.
    Suppose code frangments changed in ways that valid execution strings were still created, but rather than taking up many gigs of space you would call a timer to capture a certain snapshot and rearrange the code to perform some other work.

    • I don't mean to be disrepectful, but if you're only saying that "life.c" was written a long time ago you should read some reviews of this book. Even a cursory glance at the reader commentary on Amazon will show that Wolfram is not trying to say that cellular automata are neeto. He spent ten years on this thing with the intention of showing that (roughly) Nature is a cellular automaton. I think his desire is to point the way to a kind of Grand Unified Theory -- except instead of finding a simple formula bene
      • Damn, he spent 10 years? My mistake. I must have had the right mentor, it only took a short while to see the Nature is a CA idea.

        I guess the sample pages about how come we haven't used this stuff before sounded a little whiny.

        Honestly, I still think the biggest block to scientific advance we have is societal and cultural not simply a lack of knowledge. It's right damn frustrating. Or maybe reality just bores me lately.
        • There's a difference between (allegedly) idly speculating about something and actually doing something about proving or disproving it...or in this case, exploring the idea in excruciating detail.
      • ... at its most fundamental level, as does Lee Smolin coming from a totally different perspective.

        Wolfram's point with cellular automata is that they are much easier on human perception than networks are, and that they are both examples of a class of simple mechanisms that all do the same kind of interesting things.
  • Head out on the highway

    Lookin' for adventure...

    Oh, *Steven Wolfram* not Steppenwolf.

    Nevermind.

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