Unconventional Everything – MIKAMAI UK

What could attract 40 great minds from all over the world and any walk of life in a hot humid room in central Italy for 3 weeks, in the middle of summer, coding every day until 2am ? If you just said “cellular automata“, you would be right.

I’ve heard a lot about “Mathematica“, a software developed by controversial geek celebrity Stephen Wolfram, but it wasn’t until I met some of its passionate users that I got really into it.  As London-based architect Jiang Shu Han puts it, it’s about visualizing problems in order to trigger intuitive development of possible solutions to them: he used Mathematica to analyze 8-years of email traffic, and find interesting patterns in it. It all came down to a beautiful graph that really looked like art. He then went to explain why he’s into it: he’s looking forward cellular automata answering questions about how people can use space more efficiently. Really interesting.

As Timothy Walker, Maths professor at Ohio Dominican University, tells me why he got into Stephen Wolfram’s NKS Summer School in Italy and shows me some of his code, I understand how fun it can be to play with something that feels like a programming language, a sandbox, a spreadsheet-on-steroids, all together. I get excited, and ask him if I can play with it to visualize social graph data. He gets excited too: we both leave our pasta aside and start coding in the middle of lunch. After a few minutes, under his patient and skillful guidance, we’ve got 2 Lines Of Code rendering 1000 nodes of Facebook’s icelandic network. How cool is that ?