On the Quest for Computable Knowledge

By Stephen Wolfram

Wolfram discusses the history of computation from its earliest beginnings to current applications and the emergence of computable knowledge. Notable figures include: Pythagoras, Archimedes, Isaac Newton, Galileo, Gottfried Leibniz, Carl Linnaeus,  John von Neumann, and many others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wolfram Media, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9780965053259

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STEPHEN WOLFRAM

On the Quest for

Computable Knowledge

On the Quest for

Computable Knowledge

Stephen Wolfram received the F.L. Bauer prize for his contributions to computer science. The following is a slightly edited transcript of the speech he gave on that occasion.

I want to talk about a big topic here today: the quest for computable knowledge. It’s a topic that spans a lot of history, and that I’ve personally spent a long time working on. I want to talk about the history. I want to talk about my own efforts in this direction. And I want to talk about what I think the future holds.

So what do I mean by computable knowledge? There’s pure knowledge—in a sense just facts we know. And then there’s computable knowledge: things we can work out—compute—somehow. Somehow we have to organize—systematize—knowledge to the point that we can build on it—compute from it. And we have to know methods and models for the world that let us do that computation.

Well, I think in history the first really big step in this direction was taken a really long time ago—with the invention of counting and arithmetic. The big idea that we know pretty much existed by 20,000 BC was that you could just abstractly count objects, independent of what the objects were. And then that there were definite unchanging rules of arithmetic that could let one abstractly compute things.

But of course just counting things is a very coarse form of systematic knowledge. Human language lets us describe much more, but it isn’t systematic—it doesn’t allow us to go directly from our knowledge to computing new things. But it was still a crucial step in perhaps 4000 BC when written language first emerged—and it became possible to systematically record and transmit knowledge about things.

It didn’t take long before numbers and writing led to kings in Babylon making pretty broad censuses of people and commodities, from which at least it was possible to compute taxes. But when it came to working out more about what would happen in the world—well, probably most people just assumed it was all just fate, and that nothing much could be predicted.

Thousands of years went by. But then something happened. People had known that there were regularities to be seen if not on Earth, at least in the heavens. And then it was realized that one could use arithmetic—the same arithmetic that worked for commerce and for land surveying—to predict things about the heavens. To work out the behavior of the planets, and even to say things about spectacular events like eclipses. It was the beginning of the tradition of exact science as we know it.

Of course, it