

Mathematica man brews AI Google Killer - twampss
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/17/wolfram_alpha/

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snorkel
"Google Killer": The tech journalists' kiss of death.

"AI Google Killer": The kiss of death and a box of poisoned chocolates.

I get the impression that tech journalists purposely overhype new ideas just
so 6 months later they can trash the very thing they overhyped for not living
up to its expectations. Job security for tech journalists.

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jeroen
More (new to old):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510579>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507360>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507172>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=504411>

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jpendry
wow. this article is horribly biased.

i went to a lecture wolfram gave at my university when he was touring for NKS.
he would answer a question from a CS professor until he went over the CS
professor's head, then a biologist until he went over his head, then a
physicist until he went over her head. flippantly passing off that level of
genius by calling him "the lovable George Costanza of the mathematics
community" says something. i understand wolfram has a huge ego, but that does
not belittle his accomplishments.

just because your work "ruffled some feathers in the scientific community"
currently, does not mean that it won't be considered ground breaking in 100
years. to be clear, i'm referring to how scientists become attached to their
life's work and thus biased, as opposed to anything specific to wolfram or NKS
and cellular automata.

finally, Alpha will be judged when it comes out. if it's worthwhile great, if
not fine, but there's not much point in trying to persuade people of something
before it is out.

~~~
Angostura
Did he actually go over their heads? Or did he just become too hard to follow?

~~~
jpendry
fair enough, i didn't word that well. what i was trying to convey was simply
that he was holding conversations with computer scientists, biologists, and
physicists each in their respective languages, which to me is pretty
impressive.

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robotrout
Yellow Journalism at it's finest. "The George Costanza of the mathematics
community", he calls him. Must be nice to always be a critic, and never have
to create anything real.

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mtarnovan
Regarding AI & systematic knowledge: "No, computers haven't solved this
problem because there are no people who actually need it solved."

Is this guy serious ?

~~~
StrawberryFrog
He's Ted Dziuba. Which pretty much means "no".

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programnature
The article makes some good points, but unfortunately is based on 0 firsthand
knowledge.

Yes, machine learning+semantic web "sounds like" like oil. But neither of
those technologies are very relevant to alpha.

Yes, prolog had an algorithm for making deductions. But the point of alpha is
not to make logical deductions, but to run computational models and analysis
based on a vast dataset and human input.

The idea that alpha "answers your question" is something that wolfram
implicitly put out there in his blog post, but often its more like a
computational version of wikipedia.. you enter an entity and visualization-
heavy page is generated to explain and explore it.

Hand-curating data and algorithms may sound silly to someone who hasn't built
something as big as Mathematica, but the world of important/relevant data and
algorithms is ultimately finite in size (if very large and complicated).

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dhimes
I'm actually excited about this project. Wolfram does the kinds of things I
could imagine myself doing if I was smarter.

~~~
spoiledtechie
Maybe you should just do instead of saying you wish you were smarter.

~~~
sfphotoarts
This running shoe philosophy is fine in high school, but accepting that there
are differences in ability between us all is an important aspect to maturity.

~~~
d0mine
_"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not;
nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not;
unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full
of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." --
Calvin Coolidge_ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=340466>

~~~
yters
I hear Einstein, Newton, and Guass all had IQs of about 100, give or take 100.

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dandelany
Mathematica Alpha has officially been initiated into the gaggle of existing
semantic web apps, now that it's been referred to as a "Google killer" in a
linkbaity headline. Lets just hope it doesnt suffer the fate of Cuil.

All joking aside, I'm really excited to begin playing with this and exploring
the possibilities of a live web inference engine. I'm anxious to see what kind
of API/developer tools will be provided, and (since it's Mathematica) whether
there will be any cost involved. Has anyone seen this discussed anywhere?

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k0n2ad
I thought Wolfram Alpha wasn't aiming to be an "AI"?

~~~
Anon84
It will be a "New Kind of AI (tm)"

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ableal
The key phrase in the original announcement is "explicitly curate all data".

This was tried before, in the "expert systems" of the 1980s. Prolog and
various 'production system' languages (e.g. OPS5) would decouple facts/rules
from the execution engine. Then "just add" domain knowledge ...

As far as I can tell, what killed that was the unfeasibility of debugging. One
bad item (or the lack of a critical true one) could poison the well, and good
luck tracking it down.

The care and feeding of proper 'fact databases' remains expensive, and Google
doesn't seem disposed to go there, apart from unit and currency conversions.
(Add a 'hmm' for automated translation.)

So, this leaves two ideas for 'Alpha' as a product: a) they believe the
database grooming expense can be profitable on a global web scale; b) they
automated enough of the database grooming to make it profitable.

------
rees
let's wait and see.

