

Sentient code: A look at Stephen Wolfram’s new, insanely ambitious, paradigm - sologrrl
http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/29/sentient-code-an-inside-look-at-stephen-wolframs-utterly-new-insanely-ambitious-computational-paradigm

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dnautics
A terrible puff piece. First of all, A New Kind of Science is mostly
controversial (in scientific fields) not because what it says is
controversial, it's not - actually sometimes trivially accepted as true -
_wait, what there are emergent phenomena that can be described by simple
mathematics who 'da thunk it?_ But rather because it almost attempts to
redefine "science" which is somewhat dangerous.

Search engines aren’t good at that, Wolfram argues, because they’re too messy.
Questions in a search engine have many answers, with varying degrees of
applicability and “rightness.” That’s not computable, not clean enough to
program or feed into a system.

 _“We want to be right,” Wolfram told me. “Making the world computable is a
much higher bar than being able to generate Wikipedia-style information … a
very different thing. What we’ve tried to do is insanely more ambitious.”_

This is exactly wrong, and perhaps Wolfram is a victim of what I like to call
the "Lt. Cdr. Data fallacy" that sometimes afflicts AI - that AI is something
which ought to our fuzzy world and assigns a definite binary result which is
always or almost always going to be correct and perfect in every way. To take
the example in the text, "Where is the ISS". There is not really one right
answer. You could give precise siderially defined coordinates of the
International Space Station, but, maybe "10 degrees to your left, and 20
degrees off your vertical axis in the downward direction, 12790km down" is a
more correct and useful answer. Or, maybe if you're at the sandy spring
transit station in Atlanta Georgia, "first right after the parkway on mount
vernon" is correct; interpreting ISS to mean the former "internet security
systems, inc" (which is a query that google "understands").
[https://maps.google.com/maps?q=sandy+spring+transit+station+...](https://maps.google.com/maps?q=sandy+spring+transit+station+georgia+to+ISS&saddr=sandy+spring+transit+station+georgia&daddr=ISS)

Sometimes there just isn't one universally correct answer.

Having said all of this, I have tremendous respect for Mathematica, which
really helped me get through Grad school, mostly because their systems of
differential equation solver is quite nice, and their graphing package was
superior to excel.

