Stephen Wolfram Writings

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 streamli…

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Metaengineering and Laws of Innovation Things are invented. Things are discovered. And somehow there’s an arc of progress that’s formed. But are there what amount to “laws of innovation” that govern that arc of progress? There are some exponential and other laws that purport to at least measure overall quantitative aspects of progress (number of […]

A Theory of Medicine? As it’s practiced today, medicine is almost always about particulars: “this has gone wrong; this is how to fix it”. But might it also be possible to talk about medicine in a more general, more abstract way—and perhaps to create a framework in which one can study its essential features without […]