

Show HN: Knowledge engine – instant answers to any question - fchollet
http://quickanswers.io

======
codezero
This actually worked really well for me for factual information, for example,
I asked "When was the World Trade Center Built?" and it gave me the correct
date. For a lot of factual stuff, it worked well.

There are some catches with word similarities, for example, "What is the
lifespan of a turtle?" worked fine, but "How long can a turtle live?" and
various re-phrasings result in very different answers, most of them correct
within the context of the content they were scraped from, but some resulted in
no answers at all.

Separately, the system doesn't handle preposterous questions very well, like
"Who won the World Cup in 2009?" it says Italy won it, but I think it was some
other thing referred to as a World Cup.

There are a lot of questions on Quora about personal experience like what it's
like to have a family member die of cancer or what it was like to be in the
WTC during the 9/11 attacks, and questions about these kinds of experience
return nothing for the most part, despite being available via other resources
(it's not all locked into Quora).

Very great first go, I'm really interested in seeing how this progresses. Like
you say, if you could scrape a lot more data, this would produce a very
interesting spectrum of information.

It'd probably be good to scrape some of the "How to" sites too, I asked "How
does a gasoline engine work?" and the responses were... funny? :)

~~~
fchollet
Interesting insight, thank you!

I think crowd-based approaches and machine-based approaches will always have
very different strengths and weaknesses. The quality of algorithmic answers
will generally (always?) be well below that of human-written ones, especially
at first.

However, in the long term I can see machine-based approaches "winning", simply
because of their near-infinite scalability (and the sort of insight that
emerges from enormous scale). Take web search: if started out with hand-
curation in the portal era, until that got wiped out by algos and scrapers
that could better manage the growing scale of the web (and exploit patterns
only visible at scale, like PageRank).

Human knowledge, including the sum of personal experiences of the people who
express themselves on the web, is now at a size where it is no longer human-
manageable. I see enormous potential here to extract, understand and navigate
that knowledge using algorithms.

~~~
codezero
Yep, I agree on the whole. The problem that I've seen in a lot of cases is
that the resources that collect knowledge and display it on the web don't
necessarily incentivize the knowledgeable to contribute or reward them for
doing so in the best possible way.

What you end up with is a high signal to noise for quality, factual content,
and for things where facts are not even expected (politics, etc...) you often
end up with a polarity that doesn't acknowledge the other side exists. Beyond
all that there is a huge amount of sarcasm, humor and nuance to content that
will be hard for a machine to figure out on its own, but hopefully you can
find a way to separate the wheat from the chaff :)

------
fchollet
A discussion of the algorithm powering this can be found at:
[http://www.sphere-engineering.com/blog/quickanswers-io-a-
new...](http://www.sphere-engineering.com/blog/quickanswers-io-a-new-
algorithm.html)

However there are actually several types of algorithms working for different
kinds of questions. The most general one is explained above.

~~~
gone35
_In the longer term, I 'd like to read the entirety of the web and build a
complete semantic bayesian map matching a maximum of knowledge items. Also, it
would be nice to have access to a visualization tool for the different answers
available and their frequency across sectors of opinion, thus solving the
problem of subjectivity (which Wikipedia deals with by completely ignoring
it)._

If you haven't already, check out Massimo Marchiori's ideas for his (now
defunct) Volunia search engine [1]. You are definitely onto something
potentially revolutionary here.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massimo_Marchiori](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massimo_Marchiori)

------
rayalez
"What is the meaning of life?"

> 42

"How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?"

> The answer my friend, is blowin' in the wind.

"How old are you?"

> I have been online since April 2014.

Cool.

------
cpfohl
My favorite test for this sort of thing is asking questions about "President
Bush." Any successful engine is going to have to ask for clarification: Do you
mean senior or junior? This chokes on questions about Bush.

~~~
fchollet
I am working on handling ambiguity, as well as questions that don't have one
definite answer (eg. "how should I invest 10k at a 5 year term?"). Possibly
through an interface that shows a spectrum of answers and their sources.

Asking for clarification would also be much needed, of course.

Keep in mind this engine is still a very early prototype.

~~~
cpfohl
I'm very impressed, in any case!

------
fuelfive
When was the first Macintosh computer released?

1467 B.C.

Needs some work...

~~~
skizm
That's alright, wolfram alpha tells you the date the raincoat was invented
when you plug in that question. (google gets it right)

------
charonn0
It got the reference, but didn't answer my question:

> "what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?"

> "Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a 1975 British comedy film written and
> performed by the comedy group of Monty Python (Graham Chapman, John Cleese,
> Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin), as directed by
> Gilliam and Jones. It was conceived during the hiatus between the third and
> fourth series of their popular BBC television programme Monty Python's
> Flying Circus. "

------
dang
It answered both "Who was Klaus Nomi?" and "Why do pigs fly?" correctly.
That's a lot better than I usually get with these things.

~~~
qnaal
> discussing surface area of an infinite manifold

yeah you better edit it dang

~~~
dang
It told you that about Klaus Nomi or flying pigs?

~~~
qnaal
just commenting that an earlier draft of your post mentioned something
specific about [the space that systems like this attempt to map] that we both
know is overreaching our knowledge of what knowledge is.

~~~
dang
Oh, I get it now. Yup, I went overboard and then edited it back.

These things always suck so badly that I don't think I've ever gotten a good
answer out of one. This, astonishingly, gave me two right off the bat. But
yes, the bar could hardly be lower.

------
errikk
My question to the machine: Who is the happiest man in the world, the answer
of the engine: Forbes Magazine named Carlos Slim Helu, a Mexican businessman,
the richest man in the world as of March 2010. So the engine assimilate
happiness with beying the richest man.

------
iterationx
It got the Caribou coffee question of the day, "what battle ended the civil
war" "surrender at Appomattox ended the civil war"

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sosha
Wow! Many years ago I tried to do the same. Did not manage to get far. I am
seriously impressed by what you have achieved

------
skizm
"If I filled a one square light year cube with plain chobani greek yogurt, how
many calories would it contain?"

> Sorry, I don't know.

Come on man. If you're not going to optimize for the important questions, why
bother? /s

Haha. Good job. This will be fun to play with.

~~~
sullyj3
I just had to try wolfram alpha. It eventually understood

"how many calories would one cubic light year of greek yoghurt contain?"

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personlurking
Cool stuff!

Perhaps a bit different, but Id love to see this implemented for specific
subsets of information. Even better, a DIY version where I could enter my own
QAs (or get them crowdsourced). There could be a lot of use cases for such an
app.

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MrDoug12
Awesome and amazing piece of work here.

Don't ask why I searched this, but I found one problem out of everything I
searched: [http://i.imgur.com/cGlclWU.png](http://i.imgur.com/cGlclWU.png)

------
tln
From "How much does an elephant wiegh?" on Answers.com:

Less than your mum

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FeatureRush
There are some problems with answers form SO, example "What is monad?", but
nice overall. Some answers could be combined into one like "Where is New
Zealand?"

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dredwerker
It cant't answer "tell me about abundant numbers" or "should I take the red or
blue pill". This reminds me of askjeeves(shudder)

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jpetersonmn
I asked how to make a grilled cheese sandwich and it gave me some business
from stackoverflow. Is this just supposed to be for techie type questions?

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ealize
I understand the difficulty involved in doing this but, I would have liked it
talk about itself. what is quickanswers.io? Sorry, I don't know.

~~~
rayalez
"Who are you?" \- I am a natural language question-answering engine.

------
Grue3
>who is president of mexico

Politics portal

>who killed kennedy

Men Who

>what is the date of google's IPO

June 25, 2014

------
errikk
The engine can't answer this one: How would I achieve instantaneously that a
girl desires to be with me? Answer: Don't know

~~~
anigbrowl
Looking for such information pretty much guarantees she won't.

~~~
errikk
Cute remark!, I suggest to the engine makers that they detect this type of
situation and suggest some form of consolation

------
gtani
relevant: "Relational Inference for Wikiﬁcation", Xiao Cheng Dan Roth, UI-UC

[http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/papers/ChengRo13.pdf](http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/papers/ChengRo13.pdf)

------
gregw134
You should post your ideas for changing the web, I'd be interested in hearing
them.

------
cwt
Is God real? \- Answer: Sorry, I don't know.

One day, maybe...

~~~
oscargrouch
Maybe the engine could answer something like this:

"If There's a God, God invented reality, therefore God is not real, because He
transcends reality"

It would not answer what you expect, cause theres no objective answer to that,
but the engine could play a game with the words you used showing some "sense
of humor"

------
shogun21
"What is the dollar to yen conversion rate?" > Sorry, I don't know.

"Where is O'Hare?" > Sorry, I don't know.

"What time is it in Japan?" > Sorry, I don't know.

Needs a little work...

~~~
fchollet
On the space of all valid questions, there are many it can't answer. Judging
from my logs, it's still doing pretty well on most questions. Even though
people are trying hard to trick it with impossible questions.

Strong AI is not there just yet; this is but a rough implementation of a
fairly simple algorithm: [http://www.sphere-engineering.com/blog/quickanswers-
io-a-new...](http://www.sphere-engineering.com/blog/quickanswers-io-a-new-
algorithm.html)

~~~
shogun21
Ah... I commented on this because I specifically wasn't trying to trick the
system or ask "impossible" questions.

I understand it's still developing and improving. Good luck!

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sergnech
"Who am i"

You are the user

Lol

~~~
zheshishei
"Who are you" also gives a nice response. "I am a natural language question-
answering engine."

~~~
shakethemonkey
"what should i give?" answered with:

GRANT SELECT,UPDATE ON my_schema.* TO 'my_user'@'my_host' IDENTIFIED BY
'my_password';

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jcm1011
Is there a God?

answer: Hahaha

------
flippyhead
Magical!

