Stephen Wolfram wants to make the computer language more humane

At the festival South By Southwest, the programmer and scientist Stephen Wolfram demonstrated the new Wolfram Language software. A new "symbolic" computer language was demonstrated last month. Work on it, according to the creator, took place more than 25 years.

The system was designed to more quickly and intuitively write code and download encyclopedic knowledge of the world. Its creator promises to create a more humane form of programming that will be able to interpret and use images, website data and other not very mathematical information. The reaction was both enthusiastic and skeptical. Supporters saw in the new language a new way of creating software, while programmer David Auerbach from Slate called her frank bullshit.

You've probably heard about Wolfram Alpha, a database for answering the actual questions that the person asks. This system, among others, uses Siri. Perhaps you've heard of Wolfram Matematica, which analyzes mathematical information. Wolfram plans to combine both services in his new system. This knowledge-based, he said, the system can definitely work with many types of data. Looking for data from Facebook? It is enough to enter the phrase "chic cats", and with a certain degree of probability, the system will understand what you want from the social network.

During the conversation, Wolfram photographed himself and asked several commands to the computer, turning the self-portrait into a mosaic of blocks. Is this function useful? Hard to tell. But this is just a demonstration.

This capability of the system is not limited. You can find out when the sun goes in, entering the "sunset today" command, or do the same trick with the air temperature. Linguistic processes are more interesting. Enter the "neighbors of Ukraine" and you will get a grid of neighboring states with Ukraine. If you are not quite sure what you want to know, you can put the system to a specific task and define algorithms for solving the problem. For example, you can teach the system how to identify spam in e-mail, as well as profanity in the text.

Tungsten also showed how the system works when connected to the Internet. He created the object code, and then sent it to the cloud as an image. With a couple of such lines of intuitive code, you can create a city map or even create an ideal path between cities. If you want to pave the way from the fence and before lunch, the system will say that "lunch" is not a place of space. Another strange example: in less than a minute, Wolfram created a generator that translates images into a dog's view format. Having found several images that tell how the dog sees the world, the scientist was able to transform random images and color them into the colors of dog reality.

What is more remarkable, the program created an object in the virtual space, and they could be controlled using simple commands. The whole process took about 30 seconds.

Not without shoals. An awkward moment arose when Wolfram wrote a figure of eight and asked the computer to recognize it. The computer decided that the figure was four.

What will happen next? Will Wolfram Language open the doors for programmers? Will the software work faster? While it is not clear. We will see.

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/computers/stiven-volfram-xochet-sdelat-kompyuternyj-yazyk-bolee-chelovechnym.html.