Slashdot Mirror
Wolfram Alpha Launches Tonight, On Camera
future.nerd tips news that Wolfram Alpha is set to be launched tonight at 8PM EST (00:00 GMT), and the entire process will be broadcast live, via webcast. Steven Wolfram said to PCPro, "We've been rather surprised that we haven't been able to find even a single publicly available record of the commissioning of any large website at all. So we thought we would document our own experience. We can't guarantee that everything will go smoothly. We fully expect to encounter unanticipated situations along the way. We hope that it'll be interesting for people to join us as we work through these in real time." In a related blog post, he explains how Wolfram Alpha interacts with Mathematica.
Get ready to sell all your google stock. /sarcasm
When will I get first post?
WTF is "Wolfram Alpha"? Couldn't the post at least give us ignorami a little hint about what it is?
Qu'est-ce que c'est?
fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa better
Run run run run run run run away
Some how the "Things will definitely go wrong" angle seems to be the precise reason why no one else has done such an unveiling to the public. I think they need to get some new PR people, because whoever they have right now is not doing a good job at making this sound like a stable, reliable system.
amazing software product readies for launch live throughout the world, evil criminal syndicate comes crashing down as they start talking on-camera about their evil plan to the "soon to be dead" hero as they completely forget their camera is on live streaming throughout the whole world.
They're using their grammar skills there.
But what I want to know is how Wolfram Alpha interacts with elementary cellular automata!
1+1=2, 1+2=3, ...
1. create complex new search engine type technology
2. create webcast of launch
3. announce on slashdot
4. fail!
I wonder why people dont create records of sites going live... perhaps its cos the poop always collides with the fan!
hmmm.
"Murphy's Laws". They will find practical cases of them in a way or another.
right over your head.
I think the best shorthand that I can come up with is to tell someone to go "wram" it.
When I've been involved in launching websites I've always had to talk down the PR people from some kind of high-profile launch, to something as gradual as possible.
The process of putting a website that is available currently only in invitation-only test into general public release isn't exactly something worth watching. Presumably, a scripts been set up to do it. And someone is going to sit at a terminal and run a shell command to execute the script. Or maybe click on an icon. And then the website will be live.
The interesting part (if there is any) of a website launch isn't the process of launching it on the server end, its the user experience at the other end of the connections once it is launched.
8PM EST == 9PM EDT == 01:00 GMT
7PM EST == 8PM EDT == 00:00 GMT
I believe if this new computational engine comes online tonight the first thing it's going to define is a much better understanding of the term 'slashdotted'.
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
Shouldn't it become Wolfram Beta after tonight?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
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
...from all the commenters on Wolfram's blog. It is actually rather amusing to read through the long list of overwhelmingly positive comments.
It's summer, and the east coast is on Daylight Time (EDT), not Standard Time (EST). So the launch is at 8pm EDT, not 8pm EST which would be one hour later.
I am watching NASA TV.
Their launch video page appears to be slashdotted. What a surprise :-|
I got to watch a live webcast come to a screeching halt, live and in person.
I can't get a response from the wolfram.com website and the wolframalpha.com website doesn't seem to have switched on yet. Anyone else?
Solve: Server Slashdotting... Equals... Error: Causing own slashdotting!##'$£"$12
wolfram alpha tells me that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is not "42" but "Launching May 2009..."
the united states is a nation of laws; badly written and randomly enforced -- frank zappa
We are running behind because the justin.tv uplink is not working.
half a minute ago from TweetDeck
We're running a few minutes behind, but stay tuned here: http://www.justin.tv/wolframalpha
13 minutes ago from TweetDeck
Wolfram Alpha goes online, and begins to learn at a geometric rate...
20 minutes late already! This better be good.
DED dead, website will not even refresh, even after pressing refresh a dozen times on several computers. :) Just doing my part.
Pit it against 20Q. Come up with a random thing, and have 20Q ask questions while WA gives answers, and see if the two together can figure out what I was thinking of. My guess is that the questions will be too bizarre for WA to handle ("is electricity an animal, vegetable, or mineral?"), but it should be interesting.
Looks like Wolfram's neighbor found out it was leeching wireless and put a WPA key on it.
Step 1: Announce intro to the second. Step 2: Get hit with hundreds of thousands of requests Step 3: Crash the servers
Wolfram Alpha goes online and begins to learn at a geometric rate.
Not bad for waiting 33 minutes, who knows if the system itself will work.
You are absolutely right. This whole thing is a joke right now. Their web cast isn't working well and when I do get something, it looks like a NASA control room with big screens up on the walls. When is it really going live? This is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
15 minutes later, Alpha reports:
"Warning. There is another system."
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Wolfram Alpha encounters 'snag,' launch could be delayed
"We have several supercomputer-class compute clusters. One of our tests was to use one cluster to simulate traffic and run it against the other cluster. And when we did that last night, we found that the through-put we got degraded horribly when we increased the amount of traffic that we were pushing from one cluster to the other."
Remaining questions:
1. Why didn't they test first, then announce launch date?
2. Why are they building excitement towards a specific release day, hour and minute (which will surely cause availability issues even if they launched), instead of releasing it gradually with gmail-style invitation system?
That said, the project seems definitely worthwhile, I hope the internet community cuts them some slack so they can fix this in peace. Hopefully we see the project online soon.
That sound suspicious like exactly the opposite of part of Tomorrow Never Dies.
Alright, this whole thing just served to piss me off and waste my time. I thought they were going to bring it online so I could see how it works and instead they have a rambling, choppy video stream that continues to cut out.
They did no testing. They set themselves up for an unbelievable server load. They wasted my time. This is just stupid. Poor management and a horrible way to start off your company.
What a waste of time.
Psst, check this out. Do not comment http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+brazil&asynchronous=false&equal=Submit
I was actually able to try a couple queries. But now it's too slow, unusable!
Valtor
"Sockets are the standard networking API, also useful for stopping your eyes from falling onto your cheeks" zeromq.org
now that Wolfram has claimed to have invented the Internet (everything that counts, anyway)...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/
to life, the universe, and everything:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=the+answer+to+life%2C+the+universe%2C+and+everything&asynchronous=false&equal=Submit
So yeah... 6:10 Pacific (9:10Eastern)
and still "launching May 2009"
i believe this is the website equivalent of that injury cone cat spilling his food all over the place
FAIL
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
If you look at the top ten websites on Alexa, maybe two of them (MSN and Microsoft Live) had high-profile launches. I know that three of them (Google, Yahoo, and Wikipedia) had launches consisting of the site creator saying to his friends "Hey, guys! Look at this cool thing I made!"
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
The main page's search input area is still unusable for me and if it is for you, try http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/ instead. The "i" GET parameter is your search. For example: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+population
This is not going to help them, but here is how you can query right now.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=canadian+dollard
Valtor
"Sockets are the standard networking API, also useful for stopping your eyes from falling onto your cheeks" zeromq.org
I asked it "what do you get if you multiply six by nine?"
It replied, 54.
Guess it's not the most powerful computer of all time.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
They had on the webcast, Mia or Maya was cute. I demand Moar!
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+much+wood+could+a+woodchuck+chuck
Query: What is 8PM EST in GMT?
Answer: 01:00 GMT.
Here's how to bring up the real search page:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Good Citizen, David Gerard, your post cannot be improved upon - BRAVO!
"Population of New Zealand" gives a nice little graph of population. Other demographics, e.g. "Maori population in New Zealand". "Aspirin risk/benefit" "Heart disease risk age 50" don't seem to work.
Wolfram.....? Say, wasn't he the guy who published that book a year or two ago claiming he invented the universe???? Or was he the one on the Wheaties box???
You just have to type in http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/ to get to a usable input screen.
Unfortunately, it seems as though Steven Wolfram's screencast that's been up for the past few days used rather cherry-picked examples, as the underlying datasets do not seem to be as comprehensive as one might have been led to believe. Beyond the fairly basic things you might find in the CIA fact book or other source of basic data, it just doesn't yet have the breadth of underlying data that would make it an indispensable tool. For example, after playing around with W|A finance queries, I was left completely unimpressed with the paltry datasets and feel that any market/stock questions I have would be better served by hitting up finance.yahoo.com. They have some basic data about professional sports teams, but NHL hockey is nowhere to found, and you can't find anything in the way of current player stats for any sport, let alone historical data. Birthdays of notable sports figures are there though...
Gotta admit, it's quite an ambitious undertaking, I just think they're somewhere between 3 and 5 orders of magnitude away from having enough data and detail to make it the kind of thing I would consider using regularly. Stay tuned, might be interesting in a year... or five.
one of the things it suggested was to put in your hometown. I can't get it to recognize that my hometown of Napoleon, Indiana exists. It keeps trying to compare Napoleon, Ohio to the state of Indiana. I know it isn't a google killer or anything but google does recognize my hometown exists.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
skynet in disguise much?
Two simple links are necessary.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=boobs
and
http://www.google.com/search?q=boobs
Point proven.
but there's still no "beer recipe."
I asked it "what is the 999999999999999999th root of 12?" and now it no longer responds to queries at all.
The 'experts only' gatekeeper on the information entered into the system results in a relatively barren knowledge base. It doesn't parse natural language all that well (for example: "population of Austin Texas verse population of Dallas Texas produces no result). It's slow.
Not terribly useful outside of a few specific domains. I don't foresee myself using it often, maybe not at all.
Purple Monkey crashed the computation engine. wtf! everyone loves monkeys... where is the computation factual data on this.
"It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!" - Emiliano Zapata
> "We've been rather surprised that we haven't been able to find even a single publicly available record of the commissioning of any large website at all." Perhaps that's because very few new websites (if any) are "large" on the day they're launched.
try this
what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow
slashdotted.
Fail... What good is a site that crashes in the first few minutes..
The service came back up and after a refresh I got the answer: 8807x266036516222956587976539552151. Impressive.
I searched for "Porsche Carrera GT price" it took 15 minutes and says it didnt understand the input. I think it is just like wikipedia except that people are getting paid for updating the content at wolframalpha.
I tried "Is Tesla still dead?"
I tried "What is WolframAlpha?"
I even tried "How many legs does cat have?"
Nothing works.
There seems to be an AI inside. Try "What is your name" and "How old are you". It knows who it is, but other attempts at conversation are blocked ("how are you feeling", comes back as under development). Very interesting, can anybody else find anything that suggests this really is an AI and more than just a computational engine?
Yay me! ^^
I searched for my last name and it says I could have meant to search for "hoarypea" instead. So yeah, now I'm a tephrosia sinapou.
"The body may heal, but the mind is not always so resilient." -- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?
"Input interpretation:
answer to life, the universe and everything
Result:
42"
Damn, this thing is good!
Come on Wolfram, the computer in Space 1999 on Moon Base Alpha did way better. I just tried some computations and your wolfram alpha didn't even detect the space aliens flying through our star system this evening. Sheesh, missed first contact.
See on Wolfram Alpha when it went kafluie due to too much traffic:
http://pathstoknowledge.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/im-sorry-dave-im-afraid-i-cant-do-that/
Gabbo GABBO!
According to WA's synomyn network, Porn == carbon black.
Gotta get me some of that sweet carbon black.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Ubuntu
Seriously?
I knew I shouldn't have asked Wolfram Alpha The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.
These guys are really good.. I thought I could crash them.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Currently converts: :-P
1km/h in parsecs per fortnight
just as google
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Epic fail!
Infinity++
BOOOOM!!!
I tried it out, I get "To see full output you need to enable Javascript in your browser"
That makes this a non-starter for me. I'll stick to Google, thanks.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
I tried a few queries and they timed out. On google, they were instant, and gave me the correct answer in the top answer. WikiAnswers were used.
So, I suspect that eventually WA will have enough horse power to just look at WikiAnswers too.
Duh. We're way too excited about this.
I just thought: Let me see what google things about it.
Look at result no. 3: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.gentoo%3Ade%3Aofficial&hs=93K&q=%22wolfram+alpha%22+sucks%3F&btnG=Search&cts=1242483558988
LOL. WTF.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=shall+we+play+a+game :(
I tried to find tools for translating Chinese to English and translating Chinese to English. I found none. I mean none. There no results displayed. It's as if there is nothing relevant to my request on the entire planet. I'm sure many other eager learners of the Chinese language will find this so-called "knowledge search engine" useless.
I tried to search the keyword "Baidu" to see if I had any hits. None. Considering the only thing on the planet that competes with google is baidu, it is safe to say wolfram has not done their homework to understand what people want in a search engine.
I tried to find hits on the word "pinyin". There were none.
The only thing it had interesting was the Chinese Character Frequency percentage list which is highly biased considering they didn't even name the source they based their list on.
The other annoyance was seeing dialogs returning "server is busy. please try again later." This never happens to me with google.
I was hoping for more intelligence regarding linguistics and all I got was a kick in the head. I'm not going to use it.
At least with google I get some hits with relevant stuff. At least with google there are never any annoying "server busy try again later" messages.
I'm sorry to say that I'm finding it pretty much useless.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Somebody needs to check their timezone conversion routine, 7:00pm CDT is 7:00pm EST.
i heard ray kurzweil is single-handedly DoS'ing wolfram. he's just repeatedly asking it "what is wolfram alpha?" until he gets his singularity.
please restate bitrate in libraries of congress per hour.
I entered search string as "boiling point water" and got the result as 100 degrees C ; not half a million pages that had the combination of the search string; ranked or otherwise. Of course, there are chinks here and there. The search string "Python" produces a result of the movie as opposed to the creature. Then again, with search string as "Eclipse" shows results about the celestial phenomenon and more along those lines. In both these cases, Google of course, shows something else. The fact that, the results are quite pertinent than top of rankings sounds interesting.
I can't believe this story only got a little under 200 replies. While W|A may not have knowledge of every subject at the moment, it is incredibly capable of answering questions about what it does have knowledge regarding. In otherwords, it's a system that has displayed the capability of answering questions based off of reserve knowledge; as that knowledge grows, the system will become extrordinarily powerful. I would have expected a lot more interest in the potential for this system, as opposed to a bunch of people complaining it doesn't already know everything.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
whilst a completely user-dictated model would be a bad thing here (3 hours after launch a crack team of mudkip enthusiasts ensure EVERYONE lieks mudkipz), i think allowing some degree of user control could be very beneficial in terms of growing the knowledge base:
blue monday
Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input blue monday: Help | Back | Associate
*chooses Associate*
Please enter a term for Wolfram|Alpha to associate with "blue monday"
*enters "new order"*
Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input new order: Help | Back | Associate
*chooses Associate*
Please enter a term for Wolfram|Alpha to associate with "new order"
*enters "manchester"*
wolfram alpha displays information about manchester, and perhaps asks the user about what subcategory of life in manchester 'blue monday' and 'new order' fall under. this will generate two new nodes, and also flag the nodes for peer review.
the next time a user enters 'blue monday', wolfram alpha will recognize it, and have a (two!) nodes to work off. It can use the opportunity to learn more about 'blue monday', as well as possibly 'new order' and maybe even something about 'manchester'.
but it's all flagged - nothing makes it out into the knowledge base that WA uses without approval by a human being with pieces of paper that say he knows loads of stuff about a particular thing.
yup, what i propose is essentially a merge with citizendium (deeply unfashionable), or it could even be considered a peer-reviewed expert system (deeply, deeply unfashionable) - but some user feedback could really speed the development of this beast up.
please restate bitrate in libraries of congress per hour.
"Python" should return the movie, or the language. Python by itself and capitalized is a proper noun.
For more precision, eg. the snake, then try Python regius or Python reticulatus.
I bet then it will give you the answer you want. It's only as precise as the question.
Thank You. Thank You! That was hilarious. Someone give that man a cigar!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.