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Bing To Use Wolfram Alpha Results
angry tapir writes "Microsoft is rolling out some enhancements to its Bing search engine, including some that rely on computational information delivered by Wolfram Alpha. That means that people will be able to search for some complicated information, and the search engine will be able to compute the answers. In a blog post, Tracey Yao, program manager, and Pedro Silva, product manager at Microsoft, give some examples."
brb, dividing by zero on bing
Anybody want my mod points?
A clock has at least two hands depicting the hour and minute of the day. If stopped, it would appear that the clock is useless, but twice a day the clock tells the current time perfectly. What matters most is that you look at the clock at precisely those two moments to tell the time. Otherwise the tool just doesn't work as you'd expect it.
So when you take two tools that aren't very good, sometimes you end up with something that might be useful. But then again, just because you have two hands doesn't mean you're going to end up doing something useful. One hand could be occupied or paralyzed or otherwise out of commission. The other hand could be gimpy or not your favored hand or even cut off entirely if you lived in Saudi Arabia.
What I'm trying to say here is simply what you all are already thinking. Who is actually using Bing? Furthermore, who is actually using Alpha? These two useless hands working together just makes it easier to forget them both altogether.
It will be interesting how Bing presents Wolfram Alpha and whether it removes the inherent design flaws in it. There is an insightful but long article about the problems here - wolfram alpha and hubristic user interfaces. Two good quotes from which are:
Hype also generates funding because it generates exaggerated sales projections. For instance:
"What Wolfram Alpha will do," Wolfram says, "is let people make use of the achievements of science and engineering on an everyday basis, much as the Web and search engines have let billions of people become reference librarians, so to speak."
[...]
It could do things the average person might want (such as generating customized nutrition labels) as well as things only geeks would care about (such as generating truth tables for Boolean algebraic equations).
Generating customized nutrition labels! The average person! I just laughed so hard, I needed a complete change of clothing.
Dr. Wolfram, may I mention a word to you? That word is MySpace. If there is any such person as this average person, she has a MySpace account. Does she generate customized nutrition labels? On a regular basis, or just occasionally? In what other similar activities does she engage - monitoring the population of Burma? Graphing the lifecycle of stars? Charting Korean copper consumption since the 1960s? Perhaps you should feed MySpace into your giant electronic brain, and see what comes out.
and
Google is not a control interface; WA is. When you use WA, you know which of these tools you wish to select. You know that when you type "two cups of flour and two eggs" (which now works) you are looking for a Nutrition Facts label. It is only Stephen Wolfram's giant electronic brain which has to run ten million lines of code to figure this out. Inside your own brain, it is written on glowing letters across your forehead.
So the giant electronic brain is doing an enormous amount of work to discern information which the user knows and can enter easily: which tool she wants to use.
When the giant electronic brain succeeds in this task, it has saved the user from having to manually select and indicate her actual data-visualization application of choice. This has perhaps saved her some time. How much? Um, not very much.
When the giant electronic brain fails in this task, you type in Grandma's fried-chicken recipe and get a beautiful 3-D animation of a bird-flu epidemic. (Or, more likely, "Wolfram Alpha wasn't sure what to do with your input." Thanks, Wolfram Alpha!) How do you get from this to your Nutrition Facts? Rearrange some words, try again, bang your head on the desk, give up. What we're looking at here is a classic, old-school, big steaming lump of UI catastrophe. ....
The task of "guess the application I want to use" is actually not even in the domain of artificial intelligence. AI is normally defined by the human standard. To work properly as a control interface, Wolfram's guessing algorithm actually requires divine intelligence. It is not sufficient for it to just think. It must actually read the user's mind. God can do this, but software can't.
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
While this is interesting and possibly useful, it seems to me there's nothing stopping Google from turning around and doing the exact same thing. Wolfram is unaffiliated with either party as far as I know and certainly wouldn't mind getting exposure on the bigger of the two search engines as well.
And hey, I already do multiplication and find constants in my Google search box, it might be nice to do integrals and whatnot as well! In the meantime, if I have a specific enough question I'll just go directly to Wolfram's site to ask.
An opportunity to flood tech sites with more Bingspam, what else do you want?
Microsoft is so desperate for page hits on Bo^Hing, I'm surprised they're not bribing schoolkids with boiled sweets already.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Bing to use google results!
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
For very narrow queries, where you already know ahead of time Wulfram Alpha supports it, you can get useful structured information out of it. For example, if you look up a first name or surname, you can get information on popularity and geographic distribution and such. But the only time I've ever gotten useful information like that is when I already knew that it supported a particular kind of query. That's less like a search engine, and more like just querying a database. There have always been special-purpose databases on the internet where you can look up specific information, once you know that such a database exists for a particular kind of fact. What Alpha utterly fails to do is answer any useful proportion of queries without already knowing in advance exactly what you need to query and what syntax to use when doing so.
And yes, I've seen Wulfram's talks on it, and they're crap. He presented via videoconference at IJCAI IJCAI 2009, which he only got into because of the hype (sure, it's blind review, but it's hard to have blind review of a Wulfram Alpha paper that identifies itself as such in the paper), and there was no technical information at all, nor AI advances that weren't already done by like the 1960s (the AI advance in question is "querying a database").
Maybe Bing has something up their sleeve, but I'd bet on it being more hype.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Wolfram Alpha is well known to badly guess what you are trying to do, and has plenty of graphs and charts. Now add a liberal amount of Microsoft flavoring to it, and you have a cross between Clippy and a really bad PowerPoint presentation... let's hope Microsoft never tries to help "improve" WA.
My webcomic
Why are you so hard on W|A? Wolfram Alpha answers LOTS of extremely important questions!
Query: What is the speed of an unladen swallow?
Answer: "there is unfortunately insufficient data to estimate the velocity of an African swallow (even if you specified which of the 47 species of swallow found in Africa you meant)"
Query: What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?
Answer: 42
Query: Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
Answer: Not sure, but wherever she is, it isn't here.
Query: When is judgement day?
Answer: "2:14 am EDT | Friday, August 29, 1997"
Query: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound??
Answer: "No. Sound is vibration, transmitted to our senses through the mechanism of the ear, and recognized as sound only at our nerve centers. The falling of the tree or any other disturbance will produce vibration of the air. If there be no ears to hear, there will be no sound."
Query: Can entropy be reversed?
Answer: "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER."
Query: who would win in a fight: pirates or ninjas?
Answer: "The answer remains an ongoing debate which Wolfram|Alpha is not in a position to arbitrate."
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
I would have thought that the Bing result was right, since expressions of the same level are normally done from left to right. But I did a little reading and your right!
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_operations
I can do maths, Me ;-)