A series of online lectures with Stephen wolfram were organized in our college. He explored his ideas on computational universe and his brain child , the Mathematica. For those unaware , Stephen wolfram is called the modern day Einstein, and with good reason.
It was 10 minutes after the lecture had started that I entered, and by then he had already explained the basics of his ideas that had made him conceive the mathematica. Drawing analogies from nature on how it builds complicated stuff from elementary stuff , he then explained how his making of mathematica ; had seen him doing something similar. He then spoke about the Wolfram Alpha the free website resource that can answer any query, which works on an algorithm based on machine learning. This , he said was his flagship product and had been written using Mathematica. He also touched on the topic of Artificial Intelligence, referring to it as something funny. He spoke on how the thousands of people asking their queries in the website every minute helps it gain a certain level of knowledge and gives it a mind of its own, He demonstrated the sheer brilliance of his program by querying about Pilani’s weather patterns ; which it searched,assimilated and depicted with near perfection.
The lecture theatre was almost packed as he displayed live demonstrations of his computational wizadry on the screen , and the results of his five million lines of Mathematica code. After the talk he suggested a brief question answer session which saw people from the audience come forward and ask him questions. These questions varied from the implications of mathematica in cryptography to the pretty much redundant question , “So what is the one significance of Wolfram Alpha?” after which the lecture ended. A thoroughly satisfying memorabilia.