

Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces - blasdel
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/wolfram-alpha-and-hubristic-user.html

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DanielStraight
Brilliant.

Really. This article expresses perfectly everything that is wrong with Wolfram
Alpha (which still can't tell me how much an elephant weighs, no matter how
many ways I ask it). There are so many stories of users doing ridiculous
things because of such hubristic user interfaces. Hang out with non-hackers
long enough and you will clearly see how "they create an incomplete model of
the giant electronic brain in their own, non-giant, non-electronic brains."

Also, the phrase "non-solution to a non-problem" is the best thing I've read
all week.

~~~
GavinB
[http://www82.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=weight+of+an+indian+e...](http://www82.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=weight+of+an+indian+elephant)

"weight of a" always seems to trigger the weight query. The problem is that it
doesn't have general data for "elephant" and doesn't know to link it to
"indian elephant."

It would be a lot easier if you could just browse the data. They could really
have just used a good online retailer "drill-down" style interface ala newegg
to make this easier.

~~~
jimbokun
Seems to indicate the need for a search interface, which was hinted at by the
article.

Maybe the tool selection could happen after the initial query? The results
from the default tool guessed by WA, then choices of other possible matches.
The key word "weight" could suggest the weight query, then key word match
"elephant" to give choices like Indian elephant, African elephant, etc. and
allow the user to click which one she had in mind. Maybe some keyword matches
for elephant from other databases listed after that.

The problem, though, is they don't have the amount of data Google can use to
help predict what a user most likely wants from a given query.

------
chibea
Absolutely correct.

I had great expectations when I heard from Wolfram Alpha. The things
Mathematica is able to do backed by a giant structured data store seemed mind
blowing. As the author said the visualization tools and the (still small)
dataset _is_ impressive. I thought: We have all this data, all this
visualization options and now we can create aggregate and munch all the facts
of the world with an ad-hoc query language. But this simply does not work.
There is hardly any functionality to really process data (aside from the
predefined ways). And if you come to think about it: One cannot think of a way
more complex transformations could be expressed with WA's natural language
interface.

For me a better interface would look like this: The basic interface is some
kind of full-featured expression language to navigate the data hierarchy
(perhaps similar to SQL). You could then build some GUI to interactively
navigate/parametrize data/transformations to build more complex expressions.
To make the system more easily accessible you could then - and only then - add
the natural language recognition system on top of this, which tries to guess
some expressions from your input string and gives you some suggestions to
start from.

------
iamwil
As an aside, I don't think I agree with the sentiment of "because it's hard we
shouldn't even try". Sometimes you get dead end fields. Sometimes, other
useful or interesting things spring out of dead ends.

That said, WA's interface leaves much to be desired. With Google (and its
ilk), I can enter almost anything in, and get results. If they're not exactly
what I want, I can refine it, little by little. It's like a gradient search in
a sense.

With WA, I can't enter almost anything in, and get some sort of results where
I can continuously refine my search. Instead, I get deadends where it has no
idea what I'm talking about, and I don't know what else to do to help it
understand.

In fact, it reminds me of playing the old text-based adventure games, where
you have to guess what you can do in the "dingy old cabin with a door to the
north." You go crazy asking the computer to "pick up mirror" and it replies,
"thoust cannot pickth up the mirror" You really have no idea what you can do,
and no hint out of the myriad of possibiliies. You end up playing a guessing
game, instead of an adventure game.

I think google squared has the right idea. You can enter in some, and it'll
spit back some sort of results, usually with columns you don't want. Then you
can proceed to refine those results, by adding columns you want and deleting
ones you don't.

~~~
jerf
'As an aside, I don't think I agree with the sentiment of "because it's hard
we shouldn't even try".'

I prefer to phrase it as "If thousands of smart people before you have tried
something, you need to know _why_ they failed and have some reasonable reason
to believe that your approach is better, or you will just be wasting your
time."

I use this most often in the context of someone popping up and declaring that
they wish to create a "totally visual" language. I don't want to stop that
one-in-a-million guy who might make it work, but just blithely letting someone
waste their time isn't very nice either. (That's where the whole
"encouragement at all costs" ideology falls down; encouragement is not free
and the costs are paid by the _encouragee_ , not the encourager; think before
you encourage somebody.) Usually I just see someone spout the same ideas that
have been tried tens or hundreds of times before; the excited person should
take the time to examine those efforts before continuing on, because the easy
stuff has been tried and quite a bit of the hard stuff has been too. This goes
for many things.

------
hvs
Good article (if a bit long). Wolfram Alpha has exactly the kind of interface
that you would expect from a company founded by a person that wrote a book
called "A New Kind of Science." Stephen Wolfram is a very intelligent person
with a world-crushing, fire-breathing ego. This is unfortunate, because a more
modest man could create a great tool like Alpha but then assume that he didn't
know all of the ways that people would use it, and therefore not require
interfacing with it through a broken natural language engine. Wolfram, on the
other hand (like many bright people) assumes that only he knows the answers
and doesn't bother to think that others might be able to do more with the tool
than he could ever think of.

~~~
encoderer
"This is unfortunate, because a more modest man could create a great tool like
Alpha but then assume that he didn't know all of the ways that people would
use it, and therefore not require interfacing with it through a broken natural
language engine. Wolfram, on the other hand (like many bright people) assumes
that only he knows the answers and doesn't bother to think that others might
be able to do more with the tool than he could ever think of."

I promise I'm not trolling, but that sounds a lot like Steve Jobs.

~~~
sp332
Steve Jobs only succeeded because he could really pitch his ideas. He could
make people want his product ("reality distortion field"). Wolfram doesn't
have that kind of charisma.

~~~
jimbokun
Steve Jobs also was not responsible for the Newton, it should be noted, but
the direct control iPhone interface came out on his watch. The Mac offered far
more direct control than the IBM PC. So I would suggest Jobs also has better
instincts for interface design than Wolfram.

------
briguy44
Summary to looooooooong article. Author feels that Wolfram should have an
alternative direct interface that does not required AI to interpret the
meaning/goal of your natural language text query. Kind of like how Grafiti did
for the Palm.

~~~
blasdel
Hey, it's _only_ 4000 words on a single subject -- his usual style is to write
a series of ten 40,000 word posts using self-invented neologisms about how the
media & bureaucrats really control our democracy and advocating for its
replacement with Jacobite neo-cameralism.

~~~
johnnybgoode
Just to clarify, blasdel didn't make that up. That really is his usual style.

------
wglb
Very nicely written article.

Aside from the alpha discussion, an additional useful point is the concept of
too-intelligent interfaces. This is related to two other observations. One is
that for high-throughput data entry (also programming) a nice GUI is really
not the thing you want. You want to be able to navigate entirely with the
keyboard.

The other is wsywig document processors. Serious documentation (such as that
for a fighter aircraft, which when printed out weighs more than the aircraft
itself, of for documentation required by the FDA for new drugs) is not really
done with wsywig editors, but markup editors of different kinds. If you
document is 300,000 pages, you want the pagination to be done in batch.

------
schizoidboy
"Give it up for the standardization of the screw."

A memorable quote.

On a related note, there was an interesting C-SPAN BookTv program recently
where the author talked about the revolutionary standardization of
international freight shipping containers:

<http://tinyurl.com/mwmrwq> (booktv.org)

------
jimbokun
It was interesting reading the article thinking "yeah, like the Newton" before
the author mentioned the Newton and then "yeah, like the way Google routes to
different applications based on the kind of query" before the author mentioned
how Google routes to different applications based on the kind of query. Great
minds, I guess. :)

------
scott_s
If I could double up-vote this article, I would. Surprisingly astute, and I
think I learned something about tools and interfaces.

------
caffeine
I think Wolfram put up their crazy interface in order to avoid just giving
away free online Mathematica. Also to allow Stephen's ego to further blossom.

 _If_ you could use WA as a Mathematica console BUT with access to great
built-in (crawled!) data and visualization tools, _then_ it would be useful.

------
tommy_chheng
Wordy article but I agree on his points. WA is trying to solve a non-existent
problem for this particular use case. A person _wants_ to see a label rather
than a graph.

------
aswanson
Spot on.

If only this were written the week before we were deluged with Wolfram Alpha
articles and the attendant hype, here and everywhere else.

On to Chrome OS, then Mencius. We need another reality check on the latest
planet-changer.

~~~
stcredzero
_We need another reality check on the latest planet-changer._

It's the same reality check as always: the majority of people don't understand
it (and implications) well enough to really use it.

The computer revolution hasn't happened yet. It's underway, and it's going to
take time to overcome cultural inertia.

------
fizx
Even when I'm trying to be really obvious:

[http://www01.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=calories+in+a+peanut+...](http://www01.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=calories+in+a+peanut+butter+and+jelly+sandwich)

