View source for Kurt Gödel is Laughing His Ass Off Right Now

I use [[Mathematica]] occasionally.  I think it sucks<ref>I will write up why I think it sucks it in more detail at some point on my [[Mathematica]] page, but for now I refer you to [[Absolute vs Relative Scale|this]].  To be fair, I'm using an old copy of Mathematica 3.0, but I've looked at the feature lists of the newer versions and they don't seem to fix (or even acknowledge) the issues I have with it, so I've never bothered to upgrade.  I have an article brewing about my math problem solving workflow that I hope to post before the heat death of the universe.</ref> and I loathe it, but I sometimes find it useful for implementing mathematical algorithms and solvers before (or after) I implement them in production code, for prototyping (or debugging).  

Regardless of how I feel about the technical aspects of Mathematica itself, wow, is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram Stephen Wolfram]<ref>Read the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Stephen_Wolfram talk page] as well, of course.</ref> a piece of work, or what?  I have a healthy ego, and I think I'm a pretty smart guy, but my God, that man's ego burns with the light of a thousand suns.  He's obviously very smart, and he's a very successful businessperson, but the magnitude of his ego-maniacal self-promotion transcends any level of intelligence or success.

A group of friends and I used to do dramatic readings of the '''About the Author''' text from the [http://www.amazon.com/Mathematica-Book-Fourth-Stephen-Wolfram/dp/product-description/0521643147 ''Mathematica Book''], which begins thusly:

<blockquote>
'''About the Author'''<br/>
''Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today.''
</blockquote>

The guy wrote that himself.  

Wait, while searching for that, I see he updated it slightly [http://reference.wolfram.com/legacy/v5_2/book/section-0.1.1 in later versions]:

<blockquote>
'''About the Author'''<br/>
''Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, and a well-known scientist. He is widely regarded as the most important innovator in technical computing today, as well as one of the world's most original research scientists.''
</blockquote>

I guess the original didn't fully express the boundless expanse of his awesomeness.

Even so, I never really thought much about posting this opinion publicly<ref>No, not even after ''A New Kind of Science'' came out.</ref>&mdash;it just didn't seem worth it&mdash;until today.  

As most of the internet knows, Wolfram launched [http://www.wolframalpha.com/ Wolfram|Alpha] a little while back.  Cutting through the hype, it seems to be a project that's trying to take a lot of data and unify and tag it semantically with units and so forth, so computers can reason and compute about it.  People have found&mdash;like with [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc most of these knowledge representation attempts]&mdash;if you stray very far from the examples, [http://adrianboeing.blogspot.com/2009/05/wolfram-alpha.html it doesn't work very well].  But hey, it's cool that they're trying.  I'm all for big and well-funded AI projects.

Given that it doesn't work very well, it becomes very useful for jokes.  As the punchline to a mail I was sending to some friends who were debating whether game designers should learn to program, and if so, how should they learn, I decided to [http://www67.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how%20to%20program ask Wolfram|Alpha].  This was its reply:

<center>
[[Image:Wolframalpha-crop.png]]
</center>

To me, this image is the knowledge-search-engine equivalent to the [[Do Your Job Well, Please|Warren-Spector-game-journalism quote]].  It's just beautiful along every axis.

<center>
[[Image:Kurt Godel.jpg|Kurt Gödel is not amused.]] &nbsp;&nbsp; [[Image:Stephen Wolfram.jpg|Stephen Wolfram]]
</center>

===Miscellaneous===

<ul>
<li>The most excellent [http://mollyrocket.com/casey Casey Muratori] asks:
<blockquote>
''Does anyone want to bet as to which will gain self-awareness first: Wolfram Alpha or Wolfram, Stephen?''
</blockquote>
'''''Update:'''''  Casey was inspired to compose a piece of music titled, [http://mollyrocket.com/11235 ''Stephen Wolfram's Ego Rises in the Night Sky''].

</li><li>Sadly, if you [http://www52.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=the+light+of+a+thousand+suns ask Wolfram|Alpha to compute the light of a thousand suns], you get [[Media:Wolframalpha-suns-crop.png|nonsense]].  '''''Update:'''''  someone pointed out that ''sun'' is a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cun_(unit) Japanese unit of length measurement], so Wolfram|Alpha's answer is not technically nonsense ''per se'', it's just bumbling and clueless<ref>Kind of like you'd expect from just a plain old computer program.</ref>.  I'm not sure why it decided to multiply ''c'' times 1000 suns given the phrase.

</li><li>This is the image displayed when you click on [http://www67.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html Wolfram's intro screencast]:
<center>
[[Image:Wolframalpha-screencast.png]]
</center>

</li><li>If you look at the [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wolfram_Alpha&oldid=292985319 current version of the Wikipedia page for Wolfram|Alpha] (at the time I wrote the page), it has the following:  ''It was announced in March 2009 by British physicist, mathematician, visionary, computer scientist, software developer, promoter, entrepreneur, author and businessman Stephen Wolfram, and was released to the public on May 15, 2009.''  Nine adjectives<ref>Some people on the internets have quarreled with my use of the term ''adjective'' here.  I'm not an expert in these wordy matters, but I believe these are [http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/noun-as-adjective.html nouns used as adjectives].  Unfortunately, Wolfram|Alpha [http://www79.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=nouns+used+as+adjectives is no help].</ref>!  Ten if you count "British".  '''''Update:''''' sadly, I guess some people took it too far and the Wikipolice edited the sentence back to sanity.

</li><li>It just keeps getting better:  if you [http://www.google.com/search?q=Stephen%20Wolfram%20is%20the%20creator%20of%20Mathematica%20and%20is%20widely%20regarded%20as%20the%20most%20important%20innovator%20in%20scientific%20and%20technical%20computing%20today.&hl=en Google the bio quote], Google helpfully suggests:  ''Did you mean: Stephen Wolfram is the creator of '''Mathematics''' and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today.'' Um, no, I didn't, thanks.

</li><li>Anders Sandberg wrote [http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2009/04/monumental_egos.html a wonderful article] proposing the ''Wolfram'' as the unit of ego measurement.

</li><li>Strange:  this page is [[Media:Wolframalpha-ass.png|currently the #6 result]] on a [http://www.google.com/search?q=ass Google search of the word "ass"]. '''''Update:''''' now it's #5, how high will it go?  '''''Update&sup2;''''': apparently it got to #3, but now it's nowhere to be seen in the first 10 pages; I had no idea the "ass" results were so fresh.  '''''Update&sup3;''''':  It is back on the charts, holding steady [http://www.google.com/search?q=ass&hl=en&start=60&sa=N on page seven].  I now get about four hits a day from people searching on the word "ass", which means they go seven pages ''deep'' in the search results and then find my page and Kurt Gödel's name and click through.

</li><li>Wolfram gave a [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60P7717-XOQ TED lecture] this year, and this was one of the slides:
<center>
[[Image:Wolfram-physics.jpg|500px]]
</center>
I like how that little ol' thing called ''Physics'' nestles in there nicely with his other accomplishments. 

The lecture got a standing ovation at the end, which confuses me, since even ignoring my obvious issues with Wolfram's ego, the lecture just wasn't that good, he didn't say much, and he hyped his own products.  I suspect there's a bit of "I'm at TED and paid a lot of money and am sitting next to Al Gore, so these must be the best lectures ever!" going on at the conference.  That said, the absolute best lecture I've ever seen, [http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html Ken Robinson's talk on education], was at TED in 2006, so maybe I'm just missing something awesome about Wolfram's lecture too.

</li>
</ul>


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[[Category:Math]]
[[Category:Opinions]]