Stephen Wolfram

The thing that's special about the computation in our brains is that it's connected to our goals and our kind of whole societal story.

And, you know, I think that's the special feature.

And now the question then is when you see this whole sort of ocean of computation out there, how do you connect that to the things that we humans care about?

Mm-hmm.

And in a sense, a large part of my life has been involved in the technology of how to do that.

And what I've been interested in is kind of building computational language that allows that something that both we humans can understand and that can be used to determine computations that are actually computations we care about.

See, I think when you look at something like one of these cellular automata and it does some complicated thing, you say, that's fun, but why do I care?

Well, you could say the same thing actually in physics.

You say, oh, I've got this material and it's a ferrite or something.

Why do I care?

You know, it has some magnetic properties.

Why do I care?

It's amusing, but why do I care?

Well, we end up caring because, you know, ferrite is what's used to make magnetic tape, magnetic disks, whatever.

Or, you know, we could use liquid crystals as made used to make, well, not actually increasingly not, but it has been used to make computer displays and so on.

So in a sense, we're mining these things that happen to exist in the physical universe and making it be something that we care about because we sort of entrain it into technology.

And it's the same thing in the computational universe that a lot of what's out there is stuff that's just happening, but sometimes we have some objective and we will go and sort of mine the computational universe for something that's useful for some particular objective.

on a large scale, trying to do that, trying to sort of navigate the computational universe to do useful things, you know, that's where computational language comes in.

And, you know, a lot of what I've spent time doing and building this thing we call Wolfram Language, which I've been building for the last one-third of a century now, and kind of...

the goal there is to have a way to express kind of computational thinking, computational thoughts in a way that both humans and machines can understand.