Stephen Wolfram's "Galileo Moment"

Computation is mathematical poetry. That may not be self-evident, but when you hear Stephen Wolfram talk about it, there is little doubt. Wolfram arrived to a packed hall at the South by Southwest Interactive conference Sunday, and he came to preach the gospel of computation. It is, he told us, one of the biggest ideas in human history.

But don't confuse computation with mathematics. Math allows us to describe the general features of our world, but computation lets us go deeper. For many years, wherever Wolfram went he would see computation, and often in nature. He began to wonder what were nature's programs like. His self-described "Galileo Moment" came when he decided to turn his computer (his computational telescope) at the computational universe. After running thousands of simulations he now believes that there is a computational program that guides the universe...all we have to do is find it. And that analysis is ongoing.

In the meantime, Wolfram's explorations of the computational universe come to you and me in the form of Wolfram Alpha, a 20-million-line computational engine for the masses. A Pro version launched February 8, and if you haven't checked this out, the 'wow' factor alone is worth it. This is not a search engine, though at first visit it has all the design grammar of a search engine. It's a "Computational Knowledge Engine" - in function, an automated research analyst that draws its data from primary sources (when it can) to help you combine and make sense of the world by running your queries through thousands of data sets. There are four goals behind Wolfram Alpha's design:

1. it has to know about our world, it needs to be able to access vast amounts of raw data
2. it has to understand queries in natural language and be able to answer 90% accurately and another 5% with a reasonable accuracy
3. it should automatically generate reports about the answer, providing extra context that users didn't expect
4. it has to figure out how to tell a story from the data pull

In the coming year Wolfram Alpha's team will roll out the ability for users to upload their own data for analysis...this even extends to pictures snapped on your smartphone, which you'll be able to analyze through the mobile app. Additionally, the team will augment the current myriad 'small data' sets with an increasing number of Big Data sets. These will help with natural language queries and contextual reporting.

Wolfram's vision of the future is that ambient computation will become more and more prevalent in our lives. As we move through last days of Moore's Law and on to the next paradigm, he expects we'll see more auto-pilots for sectors of life like health and finance. But if the world is moving more and more to computation, what makes you and I special and distinct? Wolfram's answer, in not so many words, is the social layer that collects and conveys our details and *our* life's story.

Wolfram closed with this thought. Just as we look back to tribal cultures for the 'wisdom of the ancients,' the exobytes of data we will generate about ourselves during this period in history will be parsed by future generations for analyses that we can't begin to imagine. The sum total of our Tweets, Likes, Shares, Pins, pix and video uploads will be the computational data set that our descendants will scour for the answer to what gives humans purpose. We are what we Tweet.

To play around with Wolfram Alpha, visit: http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Also, there's a great interview with Wolfram that touches on much of this. Check out episode 7 of the webcast series Triangulation here: http://youtu.be/jm6MJ2VICWI