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Climate change and programming ?

POSTED BY: Vitaliy Kaurov
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This point about language literacy has come up recently in Stephen Wolfram's previous blog post on talking to AI. The problem of communicating with AI becomes much simpler if Wolfram Language becomes generally common.

Of course, developing AI seems like a good way of solving the world's problems, and in some ways a reasonable approach. But one has to admit that it also seems like wishful thinking, as does the idea of a technologist doing ordinary technology, as does the idea of just plodding along hoping someone smarter will take care of it.

More effective, in my opinion, is to learn the methods found in Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" and help develop that science of simple rules. Most difficult problems require this sort of approach, where the result is essentially computational, in essence simple, and it might not actually make sense in a sort of traditional way. For example, many problems can be phrased as a sort of algorithmic optimization, and this calls for surprising efficient programs.

At our summer school, many sorts of Wolfram Science projects are done, and there are always a few about ecology, a few about engineering, a few about optimization, and several about the pure underlying science of simple programs.

POSTED BY: Todd Rowland

I'll definitely read the full article later on, but I have to say... I feel there's an addition angle at work here when we're talking about languages that are "typically dismissed as domain-specific".

The thing is that some languages aren't even widely recognized as languages. People think of Mathematica (or Matlab, or Maple) as software suites, as programs they use for something. I know I've certainly heard people say that they can't program, but they know how to use Mathematica. (Why yes, I nearly fainted too, thanks for asking.) Let's see if the recent christening of the Wolfram Language actually helped.

POSTED BY: Bianca Eifert
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