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A Look At the Wolfram Alpha "Search Engine"
An anonymous reader points out a ReadWriteWeb piece on an hour-long demo of Wolfram|Alpha (which we discussed at its announcement). Stephen Wolfram does not like to call it a "search engine," preferring instead the term "computational knowledge engine." It will open to the public in May. "The hype around Wolfram|Alpha, the next 'Google killer' from the makers of Mathematica, has been building over the last few weeks. Today, we were lucky enough to attend a one-hour web demo with Stephen Wolfram, and from what we've seen, it definitely looks like it can live up to the hype — though, because it is so different from traditional search engines, it will definitely not be a 'Google killer.' According to Stephen Wolfram, the goal of Alpha is to give everyone access to expert knowledge and the data that a specialist would be able to compute from this information."
...with their web-crawling keyword-sculling technology, but it's only normal that someone else was researching what to ~do~ with all the data. IE (data analysis for human comprehension) and Google would make one fierce - and useful - blend.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
What role will cellular automata play in this, and will this also define the basic nature of universal mechanics?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It took Mathematica many years to become even marginally correct and useful. If Alpha proceeds at the same pace, it won't have any impact at all.
FTFA:
...according to Stephen Wolfram, Alpha is built on top of 5 million lines of Mathematica code which currently run on top of about 10,000 CPUs (though Wolfram is actively expanding its server farm in preparation for the public launch).
5 *million* lines of Mathematica? How many code monkeys does he have working for him?
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
The Hype: The singularity is here people and Wolfram is our prophet!
The Demo: It's like a search engine but not as good, so he doesn't like you calling it that.
The Product: I can't wait.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'm still waiting on a decent search engine that supports perl regular expressions
Google won't be killed until someone perfects an AI that you can have a search 'conversation' with, who can understand goddamn context and intelligently narrow down, find relevant articles that don't contain your keywords, etc. Kinda like the librarian from Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" novel, but more powerful.
The main reason no one will beat Google until then is that Google is extremely wealthy and can outspend you as it continually perfects information sorting itself, not to mention buy any technology that comes close to threatening it. If you really developed a Google-killer and presented it to the world, do you also have the stones to turn down, say, $100 million? I don't think so, it would take you probably 20-30 years to make that on your own, if you're lucky, with the search field full of competition and Google's mature business-plan in place. Even the days of Alta-Vista were essentially the Cowboy West, unsophisticated and without any proven business plans. Google walked in and owned right away, then discovered how to make money off search when no one else was.
Even then, the founders of Google tried to sell their brilliant search idea not for $100 million dollars, but for $1 million dollars, and there were no takers. They were forced to go it alone. If someone had offered them $500,000 they probably would've taken it and ran.
Although, if you really do develop an AI, there'll be a billion more profit opportunities than search, that's peripheral. An AI can do menial labor far better, faster, stronger than a human. What happens when McDonalds is staffed solely by robots. That would be pretty damn cool actually. They work for the price of electricity, maybe we can get the price of a cheeseburger back down to $0.25 :D
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
It seems they are not trying to index the web, nor trying to replace Google.
Instead they are trying to compute knowledge-worthy data from a small subset of the web using natural language algorithms.
Queries like "What is the melting point of iron?" are processed and answered, instead of just trying to score pages based on keywords.
This could really work.
.: Max Romantschuk
... until it's in beta.
The whole article was an advert for Google. The W|A search engine has nothing to do with the kind of problems solved by the Google algorithm so why does every article about it seem to bring up Google on every other line??
This is the first time I've ever heard about it and I usually check technologically acclimated news sites. Is this a "Google killer" like Cuil was?
"The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec^2" -Marcus Dolengo
Quote :D
What happens when McDonalds is staffed solely by robots. That would be pretty damn cool actually. They work for the price of electricity, maybe we can get the price of a cheeseburger back down to $0.25
end Quote
The most important question is however.
Will a BIg Mac still taste like regurgidated cardboard?
Think I'm biased? Well maybe, I plan on going through life without EVER setting foot in a McD's (That includes drive through's). What they describe/offer as food does not interest me in the slightest and NO, I don't work for a competitor.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
If they can figure out how to get this thing to understand financial data, it would be quite useful. That whole area needs more theoretical work.
Machine understanding of financial data is tough. Partly because the data is willfully obfuscated. I once developed a system for turning SEC filings into XBRL (which is an XML representation for financial statements.) At one point, I had several hundred euphemisms for "Net Loss". The connection between financial reporting and reality is at times tenuous.
Accounting is fundamentally mis-designed. The problem is that some numbers are actual, some have tolerances, some are estimates whose actual value will be known at a future date, and some are estimates whose actual value will never be known. Numbers of all four categories are added, and the result is given as a number without a tolerance. That's just wrong. Accounting works that way for historical reasons; it was designed when arithmetic was expensive. Why it stays that way is more interesting, but beyond the scope of this posting. Because of these problems, machine understanding of traditional accounting data is very difficult.
(Back when I did Downside I was more into this, but when I started getting invited to accounting conferences, I realized I didn't want to get into accounting standardization as a field.)
Another query with a very sophisticated result was "uncle's uncle's brother's son." [...] Alpha actually returns an interactive genealogic tree with additional information, including data about the 'blood relationship fraction,' for example (3.125% in this case).
Your "uncle's uncle's brother's son" could well be your father.
Just announced: Corey Hart has joined on as the lead promoter of the new "computational knowledge engine." In related news they have now renamed the engine to signify the merging of their separate talents.
"I believe that Wolfram Hart has the ability to become the Alpha and the Omega of internet informatics" said Hart in a midnight press conference.
Not everyone is celebrating this new turn of events, however. A man only identifying himself as Angel has come out in opposition to a company who openly support those that wear their sunglasses only at night.
If you think that Google haven't thought about what they could 'do' with the data then you haven't read the articles in which the adverts in which Google advertises for technicians with security clearance were described.
Sometimes it doesn't benefit a company to let you know what it is 'doing' with the data.
Quick, somebody ask it what "the first number not nameable in under ten words" is!
He cannot be serious.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
If Google does no evil and someone kills them, doesn't that then make the killer evil?
I don't know if I like where this is going.
Alpha, however, will probably be a worthy challenger for Wikipedia and many textbooks and reference works. Instead of looking up basic encyclopedic information there, users can just go to Alpha instead, where they will get a direct answer to their question, as well as a nicely presented set of graphs and other info.
So this means we just get the straight answer in the future. No more thinking for yourself, no more understanding where the answer comes from, no more critical thinking about the validity of the answer. E.g. TFA mentions that the answer to how many Internet users there are in Europe includes the factoid that there are only 93 in Vatican City. Is this true? Well it must be because Alpha gives it, right? Or maybe it is not true? But why would it be not true and what would be a more realistic number? How many people do really live/work in Vatican City, for example? How does this relate to the number of Internet users?
An encyclopedia search will give one heaps of background information that is highly relevant to the question, and gives a lot of understanding about the answer. It makes the answer more than just a number.
For example if one would look up the question "what is the national flag of the USA", the answer is of course "the stars and stripes", and may include an image. But now I happen to know there is a story behind it: why this number of stars, and that number of stripes, and those colours. I bet this will be in Wikipedia's answer but not in Alpha's answer.
Search engines like this sound really interesting to me, and can be very useful, though it will never replace textbooks and encyclopedias. There is just so much more to answer to a query than just a straight number. And there are so many questions that can not be answered that way, such as "why is polcarbonate so much more temperature resistant than polyethylene?" for example. The full answer to this question includes details about the chemical make-up of the two polymers, and how polymer chains work. That is what textbooks are for.
I read his book "a new kind of sciene", but while it is interesting indeed, his writing style is so full of himself that it gets annoying after a while. It looks unprofessional. He should have used a more neutral writing style and not mention himself all the time. What he did really hurts the book, and my image of him whenever I hear about other projects, like this one, related to his name.
Yo momma's so ugly, everybody in the family calls here the uncle's uncle's brother's son to save embarrassment.
There is already such a search engine that has been in beta for a while. Go here : http://www.trueknowledge.com/ An earlier version (quizbot) has been available for ages (although not nearly as good as the current trueknowledge beta): http://quizbot.trueknowledge.com/
I'm wondering why everyone is so excited about a product that can kill Google. Is it the anarchist nature of Slashdotter's coming out? Just like to point out that for something to be a "Google Killer" it needs to be better than Google, therefore it would be have an even larger portion of the market, to kill this "Evil" you need to install a greater evil
One hundred and twenty one thousand one hundred and twenty one?
However, according to Zawinski's Law, it also needs to read mail...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
That'll be useful for the 5 billion people who don't happen to speak it. He can't claim to be creating a google killer in one sentence then complaining about how his company doesn't have the money to do multilingual in the other. Come on , at least try french and spanish , its not hard to find fluent speakers of those languages in north america!
is there a way to blacklist all the Ubuntu forums in my Google profile?
Keep track of the domain names of the sites with this info, and then
[searchquery] -stupidforum1.com -stupidforum2.com -stupidforum3.com
And so on. I used to use the same to pull expert-s/exchange results out of my Google queries, and then they started giving Google referred page hits free answers, so it's been a while since I used it.
And yes, there's probably a better method than what I've brought up, but it does work.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
The true value of an expert is not the information he accesses, but the use he makes of it. They can often perform seeming feats of mental teleportation, jumping from observation A to conclusion B without going through the in-between steps of reasoning through years of honing their intuition, something no search engine can do (yet). Also, anyone who's ever tried to explain something technical to a non-technical person and been met with blank stares knows that it's not just about information - it's about understanding it.
Saying:
"Have you tried Wolframming it?"
Just doesn't have the same ring to it...
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
The article forgot to say that Steven talk
at Harvard tomorrow and that the talk is available over webcast.
See http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2009/04/wolfram
While we are waiting for alpha you might like
to play 2 other knowleadge engines like:
http://start.csail.mit.edu/
and
http://quizbot.trueknowledge.com/
PS. Also check out my news site
http://crowdnews.eu/
âoeA complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.â
- John Gall
If it is as big as Stephen's ego, then it might beat Google.
Not only is this not a Google killer (it's not even a search engine, so how can it be?!), I very much doubt it'll be of any use/interest to anyone outside of the intellectual elite. Googling for "swine flue" is of widespread interest, but I suspect that Alpha-ing for computed relationships and statistics is not.
http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends
For anyone who has yet to read about Alpha, what it is is basically a large expert system written in Mathematica that computes the answers to queries covering a very large real-world knowledge domain. I havn't even read that it goes out to the web at all - it's basically based on a huge human collated/organized ("curated" in the Alpha parlance) data set of statistics and relationships. Apparently the results are presented in a very slick way including charts and graphics.
No doubt Alpha is a huge achievement in it's chosen domain of knowledge organization and computation, but I find it hard to imagine that a significant portion of the population will find it useful.
. . . either you don't have any imagination or you simply don't get it.
This tool is going to be pretty awesome and I for one look forward to using it. If this app works out, I think it is going to be one of the first true Web 3.0 (yes, I hate the term too) services. Add a little personal automation (script your own) and we've all of the sudden have a little AI dumb terminal in our back pockets we can tap for info. I am looking forward to it and as I suspect it will be a free service, I'm not going to look that particular gift horse in the mouth.
Cheers,
Veni
There is a public demo tomorrow at Harvard, there will be a webcast http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2009/04/wolfram
Whenever anyone mentions search engines I instantly think of that time a friend and I made a web crawler and let it running overnight... 200 MB of domain names :D