Stephen Wolfram

We're kind of gradually colonizing more and more of this kind of intellectual space of possibilities.

But the real thing, the real challenge is how do you take what is computationally possible, how do you encapsulate the kinds of things that we think about in a way that kind of plugs into what's computationally possible?

And actually the big sort of idea there is this idea of kind of symbolic programming, symbolic representations of things.

And so the question is, when you look at sort of everything in the world and you kind of, you know, you take some visual scene or something you're looking at, and you say, well, how do I turn that into something that I can kind of stuff into my mind?

You know, there are lots of pixels in my visual scene, but the things that I remembered from that visual scene are, you know, there's a chair in this place.

It's a kind of a symbolic representation of the visual scene.

There are two chairs and a table or something, rather than there are all these pixels arranged in all these detailed ways.

And so the question then is, how do you take sort of all the things in the world and make some kind of representation that corresponds to the types of ways that we think about things?

And human language is sort of one form of representation that we have.

We talk about chairs.

That's a word in human language and so on.

How do we take?

But human language is not in and of itself something that plugs in very well to sort of

It's not something from which you can immediately compute consequences and so on.

And so you have to kind of find a way to take sort of the stuff we understand from human language and make it more precise.

And that's really the story of symbolic programming and what that turns into.

It's something which I didn't know at the time it was going to work as well as it has.

But back in 1979 or so, I was trying to build my first big computer system and trying to figure out how should I represent computations at a high level.

And I kind of invented this idea of using kind of symbolic expressions structured as it's kind of like a function and a bunch of arguments.

But that function doesn't necessarily evaluate to anything.