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Test Driving the Wolfram Alpha
SilverMind writes in to note a blog entry at Byte Size Biology describing in detail a few hours spent with Wolfram Alpha (which we have discussed before). "After playing around with Wolfram Alpha for a few hours, I can safely say the following: it's different, it's incomplete, it's idiosyncratic, and it's funky cool. And no, it will not dethrone Google, nor does it aim to do so."
How the hell am I supposed to "Wolfram Alpha" something? No one will ever say that.
There is a video called A Sneak Preview of Wolfram|Alpha on YouTube that seems to have been filmed at a talk Wolfram gave. After watching it I think I have a decent idea of what it's like to use, and just how very different it is from every other search out there. I can't wait to try it.
And to see what happens when you search for "Rick Astley".
I'd also like to see if it can convert things like 1 GB into Libraries of Congress. Google's unit conversion doesn't include the LOC, sadly.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
But does it do the Majel Barrett voice?
On the other hand, that would make looking for porn far too awkward. Nvm.
Understanding written sentences and answering them by using logical cognition is part of what successful AI has to achieve..
Something that Wolfram might not directly telling you.
I am really getting sick of it. People who has no clue about what they write, adds cheap titles like "Google Killer" to every innovation in search, "iPhone killer" to mobile app/os/device etc.
It doesn't do any good to the service/device/software mentioned. It just guarantees the huge amount of people will be "free astroturfers" for Google/Apple etc. spreading jokes about the product no matter how good it is or how much potential it has.
No, you can't "kill" Google by simply inventing something and I don't believe a scientist run company has such stupid ideas in mind.
Maybe we can get the difinitive answer for the meaning of life? :)
Is it Wolfram Alpha V, or Wolfram Alpha VI? That's vitally important!
For those of you who aren't gonna RTFA, I would like to reiterate something that is stated in TFA, because it seems, from reading comments on previous articles about Wolfram|Alpha, that people think this is a search engine and is trying to compete with the likes of Google and whatnot. I also get this from a couple articles from various tech sites that I've read who search for... things... on W|A and compare the results to Google and claim that Google is superior.
People, W|A is not a search engine in the conventional sense. It is more of a knowledgebase. It is a computational engine. Rather than finding websites that tell you about what you're trying to learn about, W|A gives you the information you're looking for on their site, pulled from a large 20-someodd-year-old database of verified scientific facts that began with Wolfram Mathematica. If the info you're looking for isn't directly present in the database, W|A will compute it for you if it has the necessary data dependencies. W|A is not the same as Google and is not trying to compete with Google, so to those of please stop trying to pass off side-by-side comparisons between W|A and Google as journalism. That's not to say, though, that Google won't try to buy them out or even start up their own academic knowledgebase to compete with Wolfram... and yes, that would be Google entering Wolfram's domain, not the other way around. [/rant]
Anyways, I think W|A looks awesome and I will surely poke around when it launches on May 18 (I think... correct me if I'm wrong please).
...and you all are so completely falling for it.
It's just like with games. It's still half a century or something, until it is available to the general public, but already we get stuffed up to the nose with blablabla (for lack of a better term) about it. ^^
This alone is a reason for me to avoid it, and recommend you to do so too.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
And no, it will not dethrone Google, nor does it aim to do so.
WHY THE FUCK am I treated to that statement every time Wolfram Alpha is mentioned?
Am I the only one getting a little sick of all these "Oh look there's so much buzz around Wolfram Alpha! Really, you are all very excited about it!" previews/sneak-peeks/tidbits/etc?
Until I can actual use it, I have exactly zero interest in this thing. Is there really any reason to propagate the marketing drivel?
sic transit gloria mundi
And what we will have? A computational data engine working with the biggest search engine. I, for one, welcome our new cybernetic overlord, Skynet, err, Wolfram Omega-Google.
Grey's Law: Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
I never thought I'd see Wolfram compete in the search market. However, this isn't much of a surprise to me after reading The World is Flat
Apparently, Google and many others use complex mathematics to figure ouch which porn site has the best, free content! On a more serious note, it's nice to see Google is getting some competition. The Wolfram search appears to be easy, yet also simple; something that Google has pioneered.
When Google get their hands on this, it will be Wolfram Beta forever.
Gosh, it's like a list of words that a marketing company promises its client that it will use. God save me from 25-year-olds with marketing degrees.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
...someone mentioned it's a cornerstone of AI - I would have to say it's WAYYYYY more like AI than Google...although it's easy to compare them off of each other, they are NOT the same.
The search syntax may look similar, how Wofram Alpha calculates data is fundamentally different than how Google presents it's data.
Pretty much just re-iterating what others have posted...but have to get that point across - it's being missed here.
doh! (Happy Monday)
Guest post by Stephen Wolfram
Some might say that Mathematica, the source of my fortune, and A New Kind Of Science: A Brief History Of My Stupendous Intellect were ambitious projects. But in recent years I've been hard at work on a still more ambitious project: Wolfram Alpha.
Fifty years ago, people assumed that computers would quickly be able to handle all kinds of question. It didn't work out that way. But a few years ago, I realized that I was finally in a position to do it myself. As I'd always expected I'd have to, of course.
I had the crucial ingredients: Mathematica and A New Kind Of Science. And my truly massive intellect. With these, I had a language to compute anything and a paradigm for complexity from simple rules. And my spectacular brain, which is much more spectacular than anyone else's, as proven by me being rich as well as smart. Which is smarter: to be a professor, or to be the professor all the other professors pay tribute to? I think my net worth makes the answer clear.
But what about all the actual knowledge that we as humans have accumulated? I realized we needed to make all data computable as knowledge. Of course, natural language is incredibly difficult for computers. So we added the secret ingredient: my jaw-droppingly spectacular brain, undoubtedly the largest on Earth.
I'm happy to say that with a mixture of clever algorithms and heuristics, linguistic discovery and curation, and some casual Nobel-worthy theoretical breakthroughs in my spare moments, we've made it work. It's going to be a website with one simple input field that gives direct access to my superlative brain, in its planet-sized glory.
Our pre-launch testers have been at work as well, and I'm dealing with all manner of queries in spare thought cycles while I jetset around the world, wowing the pitiful minds of gorgeous international supermodels before impregnating them with my superior genetic material. Let's just have a look at the query stream:
"tits" "goatse" "mary whitehouse naked" "4chan" "tubgirl" "2girls1cup" "ITS OVER 9000 LOL" "desu desu desu desu"
ERROR ERROR ERROR
#(â^^(856â^*#**â#&*##&##^^^
NO CARRIER_
http://rocknerd.co.uk
This seems very similar to True Knowledge, which has been in Beta for ages, and not as other people suggest, Google
Ruby can do this already:
$ echo 'printf("%d\n", (6*9).to_s(13));' | ruby
Does it convert into Malcolm's?
"A wavelength parcel of ten KH/Z operating in 4 Dimensions equals one Malcolm"
[Intentionally left blank]
No-one makes jokes in base 13 !
Squirrel!
Here's the big problem I see with Wolfram Alpha. I'm not very familiar with it, but from what it looks like, they are assimilating data over the internet and using it in their AI to answer users' questions.
What is the benefit people that create that information to allow Wolfram Alpha to index it? It doesn't look like it will drive traffic or revenue to their sites. If anything it will take away.
I have a feeling Wolfram Alpha crawlers will be blocked by many webmasters.
Dual Opteron < $600
BTW, there was an update to the previous Wolfram Alpha vs Google post here. The author tried some of the searches suggested by Slashdot readers.
Wolfram Alpha must be compared to Wikipedia, not to Google. And to be honest, since it is in its first day, it must be compared to Wikipedia in its first days.
The Advertising Bullshit Bubble is finally starting to collapse. This is both a good thing and a bad thing.
Businesses are slowly realizing how utterly ineffective advertising can be when it's poorly targeted or not targeted at all. Now they're realizing that people who live in developing countries don't have the cash or opportunities to buy their products. Next they'll realize that even when targeted to the right countries, ads are rarely reaching the target audience. A good example is the ads for HSBC bank - some sort of international bank or something - that were coating the inner surfaces of some Canadian airports I passed through earlier this year. I don't see how they're relevant to any Average Joe (in this case I'll call myself an Average Joe), and they were artsy, highly abstract and entirely uninformative - I imagine they'd be totally useless even if they reached their target audience (large business owners?).
I also remember seeing an ad for a Barracuda email archival appliance, and I took note of it - that was relevant to *me* but any average Joe wouldn't even know what it is - and it would be categorically irrelevant to anyone not working in certain positions in an IT department. That ad was just as untargeted as the HSBC ads - I was one of the few it would be relevant to.
The problem is that a lot of industries are totally or partially advertising-supported: Various sports, websites (which as you can see in the nytimes article and the recent talk of online newspapers switching to paid reader subscriptions, are being affected) and print media such as magazines immediately come to mind. Without big corporations wantonly throwing advertising dollars at them, the cost will be shifted to the consumer.
A potential upside is that the companies that were randomly pissing away advertising dollars *could* use fewer, targeted ads and spend more money on R&D or pass the savings onto the consumer. Unfortunately a more realistic possibility is that it will be spent on assaulting relevant parties with a nonstop barrage of ads, or the savings will go right into the executives' paychecks.
But all of this is just my opinion...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Being able to compare the population of two places doesn't seem so amazing to me. Now, I can get the population of 2 states and compare them myself.
...because there will NEVER be an "iPhone killer."
Wait! Keep reading, I'm far from an Apple fanboy...
Ever since the iPhone came out, app stores and locked-down devices have been the norm. Competition among cell phone makers is a joke - they all have to do what the telcos want and while they can try to compete with each other, the telcos always win and the consumer always loses. There isn't much room for innovation.
So they'll keep cranking out locked-down phones with whiz-bang features to lure consumers in but they'll never be able to make a real "breakthrough" device. The iPhone wasn't a breakthrough where functionality was concerned, it just had a nice UI that made it easy and convenient enough for the Average Joe to do the same things Symbian and Palm users had been doing for years, but the freedom to develop and install whatever you want out of the box was lost.
A real "breakthrough" device would be, say, a WiMAX VoIP phone, or a UMPC-phone running a desktop OS of the users' choice, or hey, both of those together! But that will never happen now, it'll just be a tit-for-tat feature fight between "me-too" products.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Andy Oram, an editor at O'Reilly, wrote this essay on Wolfram Alpha and how it fits (or doesn't fit) into the "tech-splicing" revolution:
Results from Wolfram Alpha: All the Questions We Ever Wanted to Ask About Software as a Service
(Disclaimer: Andy is my editor. But it's a good article; check it out.)
http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel
According to this, Wolfram Alpha is set to launch May 18th.
So we should finally be able to see what it does or doesn't do for ourselves!
Am I the only one who saw Wolfram, and thought WolfRan and Hart?
AKA: Evil Inc.
Am I the only Angel fan on here?
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
..but I am also old enough so have seen it in the big screen, back in 1982. And I'm not trekkie enough (read, fanatic) so have seen it again and again so I'd remember such trivia.
..."Wolfram gave his previous experience with Mathematica to answer open source. In past, he has made huge effort to put the code of Mathematica but he sadly admits there was hardly any interest due to its complexity. I think he is right, this work may not be easily comprehensible at this stage, but may be in future, a better language will represent these scientist code in simpler fashion."...
http://saurabhkaushik.wordpress.com
Check out http://wolframsbeta.com
- gave me the answer to the atomic number of molybden
- answered me the question of how old Kurt Cobain would be today
=works!
It couldn't even give me equivalent of the release of energy in a space shuttle launch in burning libraries of congress. Useless.
There are some really funny things you can search with Wolfram Alpha, but they are useless at all. I think it would be cool to collect them while trying the engine out and reading what other people on the internet have to say about Wolfram Alpha.
However I made a short list of 15 funny search results so far:
http://tvundso.com/2009/05/16/spass-mit-fun-with-wolfram-alpha/