This is a recurring problem with Wolfram: he honestly doesn't seem to be aware of what is going on in the world at large. When he came out with 'A New Kind of Science', everyone in academia was aghast that he had spent 10 years of his life reproducing research that was readily available in existing academic papers (not that NKOS wasn't a great book, but it was hardly new science). Now he's pushing a technology that indeed looks as if it belongs in 1999, as though he's completely oblivious to the ongoing evolution of HTML5 and Javascript.
Let me disabuse you of that notion: Stephen is more aware of what is going on the wider world than anyone else I know or have ever met. Like him or hate him, he's a true polymath. Our meetings will often wander off to the topic of famous Silicon Valley implosions, or Feynman stories, or the tales from the Institute of Advanced Studies, or the future of augmented reality.
So, with some knowledge of the man, I can say honestly that the charge that he's oblivious of the evolution of HTML is completely laughable. A random illustration: Wolfram Research was one of the first companies to go online in the early 90s (as it happens, Tim Berners-Lee is a long-time Mathematica user). An amusing story: it was also one of the only companies to survive the original Morris worm unscathed, owing to deliberate use of obscure Japanese computers for WRI's gateway.
While I can't talk about unannounced technologies, I can say that HTML5 plays a pretty crucial role in our future technologies. In fact, CDF will eventually have a server-side incarnation that relies on HTML5 for client-side interactivity.
Wolfram seems like brilliant guy, and Mathematica is certainly a brilliant achievement. But it nonetheless seems backward-looking to introduce a dynamic document format that requires a proprietary authoring system and a proprietary player at this point in history.
Taliesinb, you really should be disclosing the fact that you work for Wolfram Alpha, in this comment thread. It is not at all obvious from glancing at your profile.
I thought his comment implied it. In addition his profile has his website which makes it quite clear he works for Wolfram (about and github): http://taliesinb.net/
If someone posts a link in their profile and you don't follow it, they can't be held accountable.
> Now he's pushing a technology that indeed looks as if it belongs in 1999, as though he's completely oblivious to the ongoing evolution of HTML5 and Javascript
I don't think you looked very closely at CDF. It looks like it has a very large fraction of Mathematica in the player. You aren't going to get anywhere close to what you can do in CDF via HTML5 and JavaScript without a truly ungodly amount of work, and it would still be unusable for many things due to performance issues.
You aren't going to get anywhere close to what you can do in CDF via HTML5 and JavaScript without a truly ungodly amount of work...
The same argument was being made in favor of Flash a few years ago. Eventually it turns out that someone does that 'ungodly amount of work.' Why shouldn't it be Wolfram? He would have a leg up on everyone if he embraced the new standards and opened up the Mathematica walled garden a little.
I don't think so. I think it's more likely that he's fully aware of said evolution but appreciates that most people are not developers and want a nice self-contained live document format that they can email as a single-file attachment if need be.
Most people don't have a copy of Mathematica lying around either, and it appears to be a requirement for authoring CDFs: http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/faq/ .
Most people want a self-contained document format in order to read and share content rather than to write or modify it. That's why people have most of their music in mp3 format rather than as a collection of multitrack clips and mixdown parameters, why most people swap pictures as jgg files rather than as photoshop documents or a collection of TIFF and LUT files, and why most people watch movies on DVD or in some single-file digital format instead of as a collection of film clips that need to be rendered overnight before watching, and why most people like printed books or single-file ebooks instead of printer's galleys and versioned markup documents. Indeed, this is why most people like sitting at a table in a restaurant instead of going into the kitchen and making the meal themselves.
Look, I write and create multimedia content, I like powerful composition and editing tools. But managing all the structural information and assets for a large compound document or media project is a lot of work, the kind of work for which I prefer to be paid or rewarded in kind. When I'm just consuming and sharing the work of others, then I don't want to do all that work and I prefer a nice self-contained package that doesn't impose any administrative overhead. When it's as easy to store or share a HTML+CSS+JS document, online or off, and have it appear exactly the same way in a completely device-independent manner or even as the output of a printer, then I'll sing its praises. What I do not want is a bunch of extra files to keep track of for a single document that I just wish to add to my library and might not open again for a year. I am often much more interested in the content of a document than in the ability to edit, deconstruct, or radically reformat it.
When I was younger, I cared more about having control over things like typesetting, page flow, and other design issues, and also cared more about everything being as editable as possible. Now that I'm older I'm far more concerned with what a document is about than with how it looks. So I tend to open Picasa ten times for every time I launch Photoshop or my Camera RAW editing software, and I tend to read PDFs in the browser or in Acrobat reader far more often than I run up the full Acrobat environment to make a PDF file.
I suggest that you focus less on how you would do things differently if you were Stephen Wolfram, and more on whether his CDF format might open up some new economic opportunities, the way that PDF files have leveraged simplicity into ubiquity.
I'm not sure that PDFs are in decline at all. They're so ubiquitous that embedded renderers are now built into modern browsers.
Similarly, Flash has hardly gone away. Of course, 1) Flash has had persistent stability and performance problems, 2) Apple is waging a very public battle against it via iOS devices, and 3) its only real killer app, streaming video, is being folded into several (competing) standards. But it still has massive penetration.
The thing is, Mathematica is too big and too rich to ever achieve standardization. If you want the ability to easily inject graph theory, computer vision, symbolic statistics, non-linear optimization, discrete math, control theory, etc etc into your documents, CDF is unmatchable.
Now, without seeing with your own eyes the kinds of crazy stuff you can do with Mathematica, you might well be skeptical, but the next few months will change your mind, I promise.
> The thing is, Mathematica is too big and too rich to ever achieve standardization.
You need to disclose the fact you work for the company that makes Mathematica.
I also disagree with this whole notion: There's no upper limit on what can be standardized. Unless you're implying a patent portfolio or some other anti-competitive practice, of course, which is another notion entirely.
One things that is missing from html is a "jar" like format so that an entire document can be contained in a single file (without data: hacks).
It seems that all we need is an extension, I propose ".htz" and a mime type, say "application/x-html-bundle". Browser's would just download it and open the containing "index.html" (at the top level or inside a unique top level directory) and open other assets relative to that.
Perhaps you're thinking of the ".mhtml" file-format, supported by IE since before IE6? It saves a web-page and associated files as one MIME multipart/related stream, much the same way that images are included in emails.
I wouldn't be so sure that HTML isn't becoming a PDF replacement. And it seems odd to pitch a dynamic document format as a better type of static document. The whole point of CDF is that it isn't static.
This also happens to be untrue, to put it generously.
As far as I understand the story, Stephen told Matthew: here, this CA seems rich enough for universality, can you prove this for the book? Matthew duly proved it -- a tour-de-force proof, to be sure. Then Matthew broke his NDA by publishing the result early. Stephen litigated to avoid it becoming public prematurely (it was, as you say, the center-piece of the book).
I'm not privy to all the ins and outs and what-have-yous, but that seems fair. If you tried to publish something behind your advisor's back in an academic setting, you'd have a lot to answer for.
Matthew eventually did publish the Rule 110 proof under his own name in Wolfram's own journal.
If you tried to publish something behind your advisor's
back in an academic setting, you'd have a lot to answer for.
Hmm, but similarly if I made a contribution to a breakthrough, and my adviser was going to publish it without my name being associated with it at all, I would feel cheated. I think that's probably a better analogy.
It is a very strange setup where Stephen is claiming he created the work done by others. Legal, certainly, but not very nice. I guess I wouldn't care to work for one of the most egotistical people on earth, however smart he is.
Do you have any evidence that Stephen planned to avoid crediting Cook? I've never heard, seen, or read Stephen claiming the proof as his own. In fact, Stephen tells quite a detailed history of the proof in the notes to NKS, which you can read here http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-1115c-text. A short excerpt:
"His initial results were encouraging, but after a few months he became increasingly convinced that rule 110 would never in fact be proved universal. I insisted, however, that he keep on trying, and over the next several years he developed a systematic computer-aided design system for working with structures in rule 110. Using this he was then in 1994 successfully able to find the main elements of the proof. Many details were filled in over the next year, some mistakes were corrected in 1998, and the specific version in the note below was constructed in 2001."
I certainly don't know anything about this from firsthand knowledge. The credit you cite in ANKOS happened long after their lawsuits and falling out, so there's no way of knowing how things would have transpired if Cook just went along with things.
"The real problem with this result, however, is that it is not Wolfram's. He didn't invent cyclic tag systems, and he didn't come up with the incredibly intricate construction needed to implement them in Rule 110. This was done rather by one Matthew Cook, while working in Wolfram's employ under a contract with some truly remarkable provisions about intellectual property. In short, Wolfram got to control not only when and how the result was made public, but to claim it for himself. In fact, his position was that the existence of the result was a trade secret. Cook, after a messy falling-out with Wolfram, made the result, and the proof, public at a 1998 conference on CAs. (I attended, and was lucky enough to read the paper where Cook goes through the construction, supplying the details missing from A New Kind of Science.) Wolfram, for his part, responded by suing or threatening to sue Cook (now a penniless graduate student in neuroscience), the conference organizers, the publishers of the proceedings, etc. (The threat of legal action from Wolfram that I mentioned at the beginning of this review arose because we cited Cook as the person responsible for this result.)"
That doesn't put things in a very good light. I have no idea if it is accurate or not. I just found your initial attempt to paint Cook as the bad guy unfortunate. Why would Cook have tried to publish on his own? That would be very unusual, and the simplest explanation is that it must have been some sort of disagreement over academic credit. Why else would he do that?
I'm not saying Cook was a bad guy. I don't think it is necessary for there to be a bad guy, despite Cosma's rather bilious essay. Would Wolfram have tried to claim the result as his own? Maybe, maybe not, I don't know, but it doesn't seem consistent with what I do know about him. I'll ask Stephen the next time I talk to him.
