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Wolfram Promises Computing That Answers Questions
An anonymous reader writes "Computer scientist Stephen Wolfram feels that he has put together at least the initial version of a computer that actually answers factual questions, a la Star Trek's ship computers. His version will be found on their Web-based application, Wolfram Alpha. What does this mean? Well, instead of returning links to pages that may (or may not) contain the answer to your questions, Wolfram will respond with the actual answer. Just imagine typing in 'How many bones are in the human body?' and getting the answer." Right now, though the search entry field is in place, Alpha is not yet generally available -- only "to a few select individuals."
I don't think this can be examined without language issues. Lojban attempts to make a parsable constructed language (currently undergoing a few grammar issues, but mostly locked down). As we get closer to the Singularity, with regards to infant-style general AI and perhaps even transhuman implants (thought detector or such), we'll see perhaps a myriad of unambiguous languages.
Q: How many bones are in the human body
A: Did you mean cumulatively or at any point in time?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
package com.wolfram;
public class Alpha {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("42");
}
}
Been there, done that.
All that is old is new again.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
Google already does this. Type a question like "What is one plus one?" and you will get an answer. It's artificial intelligence.
Either:
1. Windows version of program crashes without answering
2. Mac version of program says "after your next question, smartass"
3. Linux version of program says never, 'cos it can't even drive a car
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
...they only give you answers.
Actually, the original source, TechCrunch, not the dumbed down linked article, discusses in much better detail what Alpha is about.
Wolfram seems to be his, er, original self as always. Isn't phrasing search results in the form of a question old news by now?
Why would someone brand something that was supposed to be an intelligent machine as "W".
How many hogshead is a litre?
How many rods in a furlong?
What's MLXII + XIV?
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Trying to find mathematics/physics information is often pretty terrible. I mean, if you are just looking for a topic you can generally pull up related papers, but that is about the depth of complexity you are capable of searching for.
Unfortunately there is no convenient (or universal) plaintext notation. If you are doing anything serious you probably use latex markup (e.g., \Psi^{*}\Psi) or something similar to render images of your equations. That's well and good for people who just want to read your paper, but for people who want to do a complex search to find very specific bits of contextual information, it is just about useless.
So if I can hope that Wolfram's goal is to make his company's math and science knowledge base searchable by some sort of contextual framework, then that could be pretty awesome for those of us who would like to penetrate particular aspects of independent fields without having to become experts on the fields first.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
All that Wolfarm has promised here is a wall of text full of buzzwords. Until I can actually test this it's just another cuil.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
Isn't a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis necessarily non-constructive? If so, a computer can't answer your question.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Good points, but this is still just a different (better perhaps?) implementation of the same concept. The big issue with the implementation is that it will only "know" what you tell it, the same as any other computer. Further it will only be able to tell you about what you want to know based on the system's ability to parse your question and return what it "thinks" you want to know.
Look, I'm not saying it isn't a cool idea, I'm just saying that it isn't as shiny and new as the creator would lead you to believe. I'm also not inclined to be impressed considering that it isn't even available to try yet. It hasn't even been released yet.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
As long as they are not showing the tool to the public, I do not believe they build a system which promises that. However, there have been lots of research in this area and there are methods to convert queries into horn-clauses so you can query knowledge bases. I designed a method in my master thesis which does similar things, however it was laid out to be performed by humans.
As ingredients for such a system you need
- a knowledge base filled with facts (you can use OWL for it if you want or a rule based approach)
- a reasoner (e.g. something like pellet)
- a rule engine (e.g. something like Jess)
- a method which understands simple English query sentences.
The really hard part is the knowledge base, because it is lots of work. And an automated approach which can understand written documents and classify them correctly would be great, but I doubt that they found a solution for this problem.
This problem includes:
- How to handle uncertainty?
- What to do with contradicting knowledge?
- What to do with temporal aspects in that knowledge?
However, if they built a tool which can answer question of one single domain of knowledge, this is nothing new. Such machines exist now for a long time. They can be helpful, but there is nothing exciting about them.
True Knowledge have been doing this for over a year. Anyone can add facts to their database, and it will attempt to use those facts to infer answers to questions. Its actually very cool, although doesn't yet support such notions as uncertainty.
I'm not sure I really want to trust a product by Wolfram and Heart. Seems like there is a possibility of some soul loss.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
I'd be impressed if it could answer "Could you explain your previous answer using a car analogy?"
The Internet is generally stupid
Tools like this are decreasing the general ability of the population to research - resulting in a debt in 'comprehensive knowledge' on topics.
Yes, tools like search engines enhance our ability to retrieve information faster than written documents such as manuals, dictionaries, and fiction, but they do not - 100% of the time, or even 80% of the time - lead us to the answers to complex questions directly. We are still required, as human beings, to read material, digest it, and often confer an answer.
People will largely lose the ability to make (effective) decisions on their own, because the critical inputs for a good decision are usually both a broad and deep understanding of the topics at hand.
Think of what kind of impact this would have on the overall problem solving ability of a population. Problem solving is often largely qualified by a person's ability to get a good picture of what the problem is. What do we do when a person can simply ask complex questions where a wealth of experience was previously required? Sure, this allows people to move on to do other things, but...
When you make it so that your analytical people - the problem solvers and those who create new things - are made irrelevant by a technology, you as a society will stop evolving socially. No, it will not happen immediately. It will happen gradually, over the period of a generation. Consider the dearth between the research abilities of a previous generation, and those who are graduating college today. There is a substantial difference, and the ease in which information is acquirable today has had a lot to do with this shortcoming.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
This whole question was answered decades ago (1970s) with the "foreigner in a sealed room" turing thought experiment. It showed that the person in the sealed room doesn't have to understand english, or even know the answer to questions, provided they are given some simple rules to link words together in a response depending on what words are in the original statement.
That's not quite correct--the Chinese Room thought experiment does not depend on "simple rules"--it imagines a Turing-Test-passing program converted to book form, which is then run manually by an English speaker, responding to Chinese inputs. But there's nothing in it that implies that the Turing-Test-passing routine is simple.
In fact there's nothing that says such a routine is even possible. The Chinese Room thought experiment has always struck me as begging the question. It starts by assuming that a routine exists that has passed the Turing Test, then shows that a machine running such a routine need not demonstrate actual thought. But it is entirely possible (IMO likely) that the Turing Test cannot be passed without actual thought, which would render the first assumption void.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
There were many editors on the book, but unfortunately, they weren't actually allowed to do anything. I mean nothing.
If an editor is denied write access to the book, is he still an editor?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Also, until you can claim to solve the halting problem in real life (as opposed to a "theoretical device"), don't go around claiming that the brain is turing-complete. It isn't, and cannot be - not in this universe, anyway.
Of course the brain is turing complete. You can prove it the same way you prove any other machine is turing complete: it has the ability to simulate a turing machine. I can simulate a tape driven turing machine pretty damn easily with a sheet of paper and a pencil. I think you're confused as to what "turing-complete" means. Solving the halting problem is not a requirement. In fact, you can prove that a turing machine cannot solve the halting problem. So the brain's inability to do so doesn't have any bearing on whether it's turing complete.
Good points, but this is still just a different (better perhaps?) implementation of the same concept. The big issue with the implementation is that it will only "know" what you tell it, the same as any other computer.
Or human, for that matter.
The big difference is inference. If I tell you the facts "John married Jane in 1981" and "Frank is Johns son, he's 15", you will probably conclude that Jane is very likely Franks mother, at least until you get conflicting information. Computers so far could not. AI research has been working on giving them that ability for almost 20 years now. After lots and lots of failures, they've also made some progress. The big issue hasn't been the collection of facts for years now, but how to combine those facts to generate new "knowledge". That's something we humans do with so much ease that it is too easy and gets us to generate false "knowledge" all the time - marketing are experts at exploiting that, as are novel writers.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Question answering (QA) has been around as a research track for years, and quite a lot of effort has been spent in the field. See for instance http://trec.nist.gov/data/qa.html - So, is the novelty in the story that someone is trying to make a business out of it? I doubt it, because even that has been tried before, most recently with powerset.com. Of course, I assume that the business model would be "getting bought by a search giant as soon as we can", and not creating an actual competitor to google and the likes.
> Also, until you can claim to solve the halting problem in real life (as opposed to a "theoretical device"), don't go around claiming that the brain is turing-complete. It isn't, and cannot be - not in this universe, anyway.
The halting problem is undecidable over Turing machines. Claiming 'the brain is not turing-complete because it cannot solve the halting problem' makes no sense.