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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?
But what I want to know is how Wolfram Alpha interacts with elementary cellular automata!
Shouldn't it become Wolfram Beta after tonight?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
You know, finally, we might be able to get a clear answer on how to determine whether a program has stopped.
Or who killed the dinosaurs and whether post stamp glue is really made of toad mucus?
And on a related note; is Futurama coming back?
Clicked pie.
Personally I'm hoping to see servers go up in smoke, explosions, minor casualties and with some luck an invasion by a passing Vogon fleet when I ask for The Ultimate Question
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
Solve: Server Slashdotting... Equals... Error: Causing own slashdotting!##'$£"$12
DED dead, website will not even refresh, even after pressing refresh a dozen times on several computers. :) Just doing my part.
15 minutes later, Alpha reports:
"Warning. There is another system."
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Also: "Magnum PI" gives the nice answer "3.142 magnums".
Wolfram Alpha is for when you want to know how long it will take for two orbits around the galaxy. Also, how long it takes the solar system to orbit the galaxy is not what I'd call 'useful' information...
These guys are really good.. I thought I could crash them.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Maybe if you spelled "versus" correctly. I'm not sure it has much poetic inclinations.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost