Stephen Wolfram Radio Lecture 33
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.
Archive it! (Score:5, Informative)
sox -t
speexenc --vbr --nframes 4 --quality 7 Wolfram.spx
Re:Archive it! (Score:4, Insightful)
Can anyone provide a link to a Speex [speex.org] encoded copy (or .ogg, .mp3) for those of us who won't touch RealPlayer [real.com]?
Re: Archive it! (Score:2, Funny)
Re: Archive it! (Score:2, Funny)
Available for download?? (Score:4, Informative)
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)
Bittorrent mp3s here [82.82.147.245]
You need of course bittorrent [bitconjurer.org]
Re:mp3's available HERE (Score:1)
Re:mp3's available HERE (Score:2, Informative)
http://but.sytes.net:6882/metainfo.torrent
Hell and damnation! The lecture is inaccessible! (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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.
"Ultradry" (Score:1)
Here's a Video of his lecture (Score:4, Informative)
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].
Wrapper? (Score:1)
Re:Wrapper? (Score:2)
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)
um.. (Score:1, Funny)
Obligatory Monty Python reference (Score:2, Funny)
Been there done that (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Been there done that (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Been there done that (Score:2)
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.
Re:Been there done that (Score:1)
He actually says nature is a network (Score:2)
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.
Re:Been there done that (Score:2)
I've played with the little critters enough to scare some virus writers at how they behave.
I didn't say experiments aren't required. In fact I said they were required for it be science in the first place. It might just be Wolfram's delivery is ineffective. Just didn't seem like he was doing anything more than digital
Get your motor running (Score:2)
Lookin' for adventure...
Oh, *Steven Wolfram* not Steppenwolf.
Nevermind.