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Wolfram Alpha Launches Tonight, On Camera

Posted by Soulskill on from the nuts-and-bolts dept.

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.

9 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Google Killer by credd144az · · Score: 4, Funny

    Get ready to sell all your google stock. /sarcasm

    1. Re:Google Killer by DragonWriter · · Score: 4, Insightful

      He specifically said it's not a google killer.

      Well, people have said its not trying to compete with Google, even though its designed to do something better that people currently use Google for. They are either simply hoping Alpha won't to be compared to Google, perhaps for fear the comparison will come out negative, or they know what "compete" means.

  2. Step by Step by eddy_crim · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  3. Idiots - exactly the wrong way to launch a website by Sanity · · Score: 5, Insightful
    You can be pretty sure that this wasn't the idea of the engineers who built the website. The worst possible launch from an engineering standpoint is a high-profile one where your traffic spikes immediately on going live. The likely outcome is that your site goes down and all your PR effort results in nothing other than ridicule.

    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.

  4. Alpha? by MrEricSir · · Score: 5, Funny

    Shouldn't it become Wolfram Beta after tonight?

    --
    There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
  5. Re:Why? by MtlDty · · Score: 5, Funny

    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

  6. A New Kind Of Search Engine by David+Gerard · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  7. Input page by Sephr · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  8. Been using it for about an hour... by Gordo_1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.