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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
The Magic 8-Cell Automaton says "Outlook not so good."
Funny, that's what it said when I asked about e-mail programs...
But what I want to know is how Wolfram Alpha interacts with elementary cellular automata!
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.
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.
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."
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
...from all the commenters on Wolfram's blog. It is actually rather amusing to read through the long list of overwhelmingly positive comments.
Their launch video page appears to be slashdotted. What a surprise :-|
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.
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.
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.
They're doing a fantastic job of personalising it though. If you're interested in "geek culture" cred to build up an initial userbase to iron out the kinks, with professional usage coming at a later time, this seems like a good way to do it...
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
Also: "Magnum PI" gives the nice answer "3.142 magnums".
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.
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