> Most of the scientists and mathematicians I know I met first through professional connections. But not Sol Golomb. It was 1981, and I was at Caltech, a 21-year-old physicist who’d just received some media attention from being the youngest in the first batch of MacArthur award recipients.
Man, Stephen can #humblebrag the shit out of anything, including the death of a famous mathematician
One thing that struck me there was the use of unary coding, which I thought was pretty cool. In my case I was writing a JPEG-LS decoder. Looking at the wiki, I see it is also used in some audio codecs as well.
I am lucky to have attended the small symposium at Villanova University only a few weeks ago where Golomb was presented the Franklin Institute Award in electrical engineering. One of those in attendance was Dr. Andrew Viterbi, known for another significant contribution to telecommunications.
"""biology uses a more straightforward encoding, where some of the 64 possible triples just don’t represent anything"""
I don't think this is strictly true, 61 of the 64 codons translate into 1 of 20 amino acids, and the other 3 are "stop" codons, which I'd argue do represent something. (and at least one of those is sometimes translated as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selenocysteine)
> Berlekamp also created an algorithmic trading system that he sold to Jim Simons and that became a starting point for Renaissance Technologies, now the world’s largest hedge fund.
As far as I know, they only have to disclose to the SEC how much money they have invested in equities. Since they don't publicly state total assets under management, we can't really know how much money Renaissance manages. They could have loads more than $52b invested in debt, commodities, currencies, etc.
If, like me, you've learned to avoid everything Mr. Wolfram writes do yourself a favor and make an exception to read this one. It's great. Either he's learning from his mistakes or the meds are working.
This comment was flagged dead (maybe justifiably), but I vouched to bring it back. While it may sound like an insult, I felt the same pleasant surprise as 'tacos' while reading it. This was definitely a different voice than usual for Wolfram, and I genuinely hope it's because he's taken feedback from others on how his tone sometimes comes across.
Agreed. I found myself thinking while reading it how surprising and refreshing it was that Wolfram was actually giving credit to someone other than himself.
At this point when people reflexively sh*t on Stephen Wolfram in HN threads, I reflexively assume they're just piling on, don't actually know who he is, and have never used any of his company's software (except maybe for some class in college where they struggled with it for homework in which they were required to use it).
I'm not above such things myself, sometimes I can't help myself when people are just a little too worshipful and idealizing of people like RMS or ESR. But the Wolfram comments are always so content-free that it just sounds like people having knee-jerk emotional responses to the guy based purely on other peoples' knee-jerk emotional responses.
Seriously, reflexively shitting on Stephen Wolfram in content-free HN posts is like the new "obligatory XKCD" of HN, not unlike hot grits or petrified Natalie Portman jokes got to be on Slashdot back in the day. I really don't get it.
I don't have strong feelings about the guy either way. Yes, he can come across as full of himself in a lot of his writings. But I don't ever get this visceral level of loathing from people being narcissistic, and I honestly don't know how anyone else does either. That's a reason to dislike and/or ignore someone, not a reason to reflexively post about how much you despise someone in literally EVERY SINGLE THREAD that has anything at all to do with Wolfram (the guy, the company, or its products). Seriously: I just don't get it guys, I just don't get it. AFAIK he's never hurt anyone or said anything about anyone or anything that was hateful or damaging to anything but his own image.
I think there's an important difference between the "man, Wolfram sure likes to make everything about himself, doesn't he?" comments here and the "frist psot imagine a beowulf cluster of petrified Natalie Portman in hot grits" comments on Slashdot.
The Slashdot ones contributed nothing to discussion. They were pure group-signalling; their sole purpose was to enable the people who wrote them and the people who upvoted them to feel "I am part of the in-crowd here." (In fact, their very pointlessness was essential to that role.)
The Wolfram comments here are not irrelevant; they are pointing out something that would be worth pointing out -- if if weren't for the fact that by now almost anyone reading an HN discussion of a Wolfram post is already aware that this is what Wolfram does, all the time.
Maybe I'm wrong; maybe for some people "hahaha, Wolfram turned the death of an eminent mathematician into a chance to talk again about his own cleverness" is just an attempt at fitting in with the HN crowd, or a crass karma-farming move, or something. But it doesn't look that way. I think the people saying this are genuinely trying to contribute to the discussion, in a way that the Slashdot reflex-posters weren't.
I've read at least three previous articles from Wolfram where someone dies and yet he makes it all about him.
I know 'dang' has come in and said "yeah yeah, he's a nut, we know... move on" on these threads before. But this article was so different -- and so interesting to boot -- that I felt the need to say something.
You cannot address Wolfram on HN without addressing the fact that people think he's a nut. I chose my words carefully. When I've moderated huge forums (gasp!) I used similar techniques to keep conversations on track. Specifically getting in early and defusing the boring, predictable, obvious wave that's coming with a touch of humor. If my post was actually flagged dead/shadowbanned or whatever, that speaks poorly to the current culture 'round these parts.
Not carefully enough. "Or the meds are working" was a nasty cheap shot and more than enough reason to flag your comment.
I've had to ask you repeatedly to stop posting uncivil comments to Hacker News. Perhaps your experience moderating huge forums has blinded you to the differences between those and this one, but please follow the rules here.
agreed the "meds are working" was a bad thing. but the rest of his comment was gold, was signal. I applaud you for trying to uphold a high S/N ratio on HN recently, but through the vast majority of HN experience a reader has had to become used to a vast sea of asshole-ish or humblebrag comments, in order to keep coming back. it's become an HN trademark. whereas this particular comment truly delivers some signal, despite this one flaw.
You are correct and reasonable. Thank you for your follow-up response.
I do think that HN's biggest problem is a pervasive and long-standing culture of "asshole" behavior in comments, so anything you and the HN team can do to fight back against it, to set a better example, is gold.
This kind of thing about SW goes back years. As a distantly related tangent, even Patrick Gunkel of Ideonomy fame wrote a review on Wolfram's ANKS in 2002 that could give one some pause, at least for a time, if one hadn't the wherewithal to evaluate these sorts of things:
A Pied Piper of Hamelin in Modern Dress
For me there is nothing new about Wolfram's primary ideas. I have toyed with such notions for a quarter of a century, and so have a great many other people. Such ideas have power, but it is a very different question whether they have physical plausibility at the most fundamental level, and a necessity that goes beyond redundancy in offering more than do scores of other competing 'explanations' of the physical world, at the tiniest, intermediate, and largest scales.
A passage in Montaigne's Essays (book One, Chapter 50: "On Democritus and Heraclitus") is pertinent: "Things in themselves perhaps have their own weights, measures, and states; but inwardly, when they enter into us, the mind cuts them to its own conceptions."
I think the mind of Wolfram cuts them short! Moreover, I feel that, for the moment at least, the attractions of cellular automata - like a carnival that snags eye, ear, and leg through its tricks, bustle, and strangeness - are meretricious.
But my greatest objection to cellular automata lies in my belief that little of what is thought essential to them is, and what is is not peculiar to them. In short, they are merely little mirrors of a much greater idea, or a deeper and more comprehensive truth; one which, to begin with, is neither cellular nor automatic, and which is discrete (or 'binary') only as a process of transformation, when it is discrete at all.
As a neuroscientist, I have seen, over 30 years, not dissimilar errors - errors, for example, of misplaced emphasis, extrinsic formalization, and naively truncated research into physical detail and parallel mechanisms - plague abortive theories of the brain.
..................
I am anxious that this excessively clever fellow not be allowed to become, through an initial absence of penetrating criticism of his ideas, and his megalomanical and almost autistic obsessions, another Pied Piper of Hamelin, in an age which is already blurring the distinction between the real (and natural) and the artificial (and fanciful), to a degree that could soon become pathological.
Incidentally, in Browning's homonymous poem, which he wrote in 1824, the Pied Piper of Hamelin "is a musician who, according to an old German legend, came, in 1284, fantastically dressed, to Hamelin in Prussia, and offered for a sum of money to rid Hamelin of its rats. He charmed the rats by his piping into the river Weser, where they drowned." So at first the Piper was a heroic figure.
Later, however, "as the reward was withheld, he in revenge by his magic piping drew the one hundred and thirty children of the town to a cavern in a hill, which closed after them forever."
In real life, most heroes ARE piebald figures.
At bottom, I find Wolfram's youthful but embarrassingly perseverative love affair with cellular automata deeply amusing:
Two decades ago, to caution the ardor of a friend of mine, Prof. Edward Fredkin - whose pioneering work upon, and advocacy of, cellular automata, in fact later led to Wolfram's own bewitchment - I constructed an instructive list of "250 Single Things People Have Tried To Reduce All of Nature To".
Some of the more conventional rival candidates have been matter, mass, energy, time, space, number or mathematics, points, lines, spirit, mind, ideas, God, machines, motion, vortices, nothing, and life (biology), apart from the 233 OTHER 'sole fundamental entities' I was able to recall on the spur of a moment - while confronting a Plenum of ulterior possibilities.
The monoideistic advocates of these '1-substance' metaphysics (or cosmologies) were often just as bright, confident, and fanatical as their latest fashionable successor, or avatar, S. Wolfram.
The latter's faith in his own uniqueness, at least, is anything BUT unique!
In Hardy's words, "Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. [...] It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics.
Wolfram can continue writing these articles but as long as they aren't accompanied by actual research, he is just another critic that somehow finds ways to point back to himself - which makes it even worse. At least even the self-actualized critics realize that unless they are seriously involved, they should have a bit of humble pie to avoid making their audience even more turned off.
I love Mathematica, I like the idea of cellular automata. But man, there are no excuses for what Wolfram does in every blog post. Shameless.
I'm consistently amazed by his blog. Wolfram's posts are always so huge and so detailed. I'm a decent writer (or so I thought), but it would take me weeks to write that post, even if I understood all the math, which I don't. It's insane how prolific he is.
if you like the OA, and you'd like to read something in a similar spirit, a bit like Sol Golomb meets Stephen Wolfram meets Richard Feynman and a touch of The Princess Bride, then try a taste of the fictional Professor Heinrich von Hexenhammer, most recently of Galaxy G:
yes it was meant to be a comedy. The Professor Heinrich von Hexenhammer character is a kind of loving homage to Mad Scientists in general. and to the most famous (or at least the most eccentric) physicists and mathematicians. Feynman meets Erdos meets Einstein meets Wolfram etc. except a little more fun and creative for entertainment value. :-P
I respect Wolfram's talents and accomplishments (esp Mathematica), but every time I come across artifacts of his personality quirks again, like in this Golomb post above, it does make me remember all the stereotypical anti-patterns of the Mad Scientist.
Man, Stephen can #humblebrag the shit out of anything, including the death of a famous mathematician