FeedCity: Stephen Wolfram Writings

Stephen Wolfram Writings
21 Jul 22:21 • Stephen Wolfram

Towards a Theory of Bugs: The Ruliology of the Unexpected

“My Program Did the Wrong Thing!” Bugs are a ubiquitous phenomenon in the software world. And—essentially by definition—each one of them is somehow unique and unexpected. But—particularly given their ubiquity—one might wonder whether there could perhaps be some kind of general “scientific” theory that could be developed about them. My goal here is to explore […]

Stephen Wolfram Writings
16 Jun 18:59 • Stephen Wolfram

Launching Version 15 of Wolfram Language & Mathematica: Built-in (Useful) AI & Lots of New Core Functionality

June 23, 1988 is when we launched Version 1.0 of Mathematica. Today—almost 38 years later—we’re launching Version 15 of what—in recognition of how far it’s expanded beyond “math”—we now call Wolfram Language. It’s an impressive release, with a lot of new core functionality. It might perhaps seem surprising that after 38 years there’d still be more to add. But it’s like the typical arc of intellectual history: the more one’s figured out, the further one can see, and the more one becomes able to do. And for all of us working on it, it’s been a very satisfying process: year after year building an ever taller tower of ideas and technology, with which we can reach ever further—today to all the functionality of Version 15.

Stephen Wolfram Writings
04 Jun 15:16 • Stephen Wolfram

Games between Programs: The Ruliology of Competition

The Basic Setup Whether one’s dealing with biology, economics, politics or a host of other fields, it’s common to encounter situations that can be modeled as involving two agents that repeatedly compete with each other. One imagines that at each step each agent can take one of a certain set of actions, and that then—in […]

Stephen Wolfram Writings
23 Feb 21:52 • Stephen Wolfram

Making Wolfram Tech Available as a Foundation Tool for LLM Systems

Foundation Models Need a Foundation Tool LLMs don’t—and can’t—do everything. What they do is very impressive—and useful. It’s broad. And in many ways it’s human-like. But it’s not precise. And in the end it’s not about deep computation. So how can we supplement LLM foundation models? We need a foundation tool: a tool that’s broad […]

Stephen Wolfram Writings
04 Feb 20:24 • Stephen Wolfram

What Ultimately Is There? Metaphysics and the Ruliad

The Wolfram Institute recently received a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation for “Computational Metaphysics”. I wrote this piece in part as a launching point for discussions with experts in traditional philosophy. Moving Metaphysics from Philosophy to Science “What ultimately is there?” has always been seen as a fundamental—if thorny—question for philosophy, or perhaps […]

Stephen Wolfram Writings
30 Jan 19:26 • Stephen Wolfram

P vs. NP and the Difficulty of Computation: A Ruliological Approach

Empirical Theoretical Computer Science “Could there be a faster program for that?” It’s a fundamental type of question in theoretical computer science. But except in special cases, such a question has proved fiendishly difficult to answer. And, for example, in half a century, almost no progress has been made even on the rather coarse (though […]

Stephen Wolfram Writings
12 Jan 23:05 • Stephen Wolfram

What Is Ruliology?

Ruliology is taking off! And more and more people are talking about it. But what is ruliology? Since I invented the term, I decided I should write something to explain it. But then I realized: I actually already wrote something back in 2021 when I first invented the term. What I wrote back then was […]

Stephen Wolfram Writings
02 Dec 19:23 • Stephen Wolfram

Instant Supercompute: Launching Wolfram Compute Services

To immediately enable Wolfram Compute Services in Version 14.3 Wolfram Desktop systems, run RemoteBatchSubmissionEnvironment["WolframBatch"]. (The functionality is automatically available in the Wolfram Cloud.) Scaling Up Your Computations Let’s say you’ve done a computation in Wolfram Language. And now you want to scale it up. Maybe 1000x or more. Well, today we’ve released an extremely streamlined […]

Stephen Wolfram Writings
11 Nov 15:19 • Stephen Wolfram

What’s Special about Life? Bulk Orchestration and the Rulial Ensemble in Biology and Beyond

Towards a Theory of Bulk Orchestration It’s a key feature of living systems, perhaps even in some ways the key feature: that even right down to a molecular scale, things are orchestrated. Molecules (or at least large ones) don’t just move around randomly, like in a liquid or a gel. Instead, what molecular biology has […]

Stephen Wolfram Writings
15 Sep 19:20 • Stephen Wolfram

The Ruliology of Lambdas

Click any diagram to get Wolfram Language code to reproduce it. What Are Lambdas? It’s a story of pure, abstract computation. In fact, historically, one of the very first. But even though it’s something I for one have used in practice for nearly half a century, it’s not something that in all my years of […]

Stephen Wolfram Writings
14 Aug 22:05 • Stephen Wolfram

“I Have a Theory Too”: The Challenge and Opportunity of Avocational Science

Theories of the World Several often arrive in a single day. Sometimes they’re marked “urgent”. Sometimes they’re long. Sometimes they’re short. Sometimes they’re humble. Sometimes they’re conspiratorial. And sometimes, these days, they’re written “in collaboration with” an AI. But there’s a common theme: they’re all emails that present some kind of fundamental theory invented by […]

Stephen Wolfram Writings
05 Aug 17:52 • Stephen Wolfram

New Features Everywhere: Launching Version 14.3 of Wolfram Language & Mathematica

This Is a Big Release Going Dark: Dark Mode Arrives How Does It Relate to AI? Connecting with the Agentic World Just Put a Fit on That! Maps Become More Beautiful A Better Red: Introducing New Named Colors More Spiffing Up of Graphics Non-commutative Algebra Draw on That Surface: The Visual Annotation of Regions Curvature […]

Stephen Wolfram Writings
21 May 2025 • Stephen Wolfram

What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds beyond Ours

Cats Don’t Talk We humans have perhaps 100 billion neurons in our brains. But what if we had many more? Or what if the AIs we built effectively had many more? What kinds of things might then become possible? At 100 billion neurons, we know, for example, that compositional language of the kind we humans […]