Stephen Wolfram
(1959-)
Stephen Wolfram is a physicist, computer scientist, and very successful businessman.
In his 2002 book,
A New Kind of Science, Wolfram published a simpler example of a universal computer (Turing machine), which superceded Marvin Minsky' s 1962 Turing machine, which had held the record of simplest universal computer for 40 years.
Wolfram is the chief executive of
Wolfram Research, which developed technical computing tools applicable to machine learning, neural networks, image processing and visualizations.
His
Wolfram Alpha is a free online answer service that goes beyond typical Internet searches that return web pages that may have the answers.
Wolfram calls Alpha a "computational knowledge engine" or "answer engine." Alpha assembles the best possible answer from curated data. Alpha answers consist of text and related data visualizations.
Difficult questions asked of Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa are often forwarded to Wolfram Alpha for more significant answers.
Wolfram is part of a group of scientists who work in "
digital philosophy." They include
Gregory Chaitin,
Edward Fredkin,
Seth Lloyd,
Rudy Rucker,
Jürgen Schmidhuber,
Konrad Zuse, and Wolfram.
They generally hope to
reduce the mind to a computer and even see the whole universe as a computer running some kind of cosmic code.
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