

Lenat (of Cyc) reviews Wolfram Alpha - programnature
http://www.semanticuniverse.com/blogs-i-was-positively-impressed-wolfram-alpha.html

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spolsky
Google sort of has a preprocessor that does stuff like this. Probably not as
much as Wolfram.

You can see it when you search Google for things like:

"What time is it in Las Vegas" (notice that it knows, and it also knows that
you probably mean Las Vegas NV but might mean NM, and that Las Vegas NM is
smaller)

"MSFT" (e.g. a ticker)

"Who is the president of France"

"16 USD in GBP"

From the stories, it SOUNDS like Wolfram can answer a lot more of these kinds
of queries than Google, which makes me think that the best way to use a
technology like this is to sell it to Google to plug in as their pre-search
pre-processor to replace the simple ones they've already developed.

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frig
Thanks for this.

Lenat's probably the best-positioned guy out there to back-infer some of
alpha's design and limitations from a two-hour demo; this is the most
informative summary I've seen.

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programnature
Yes, his description is more on-the-money and bs-free than the other one's
I've seen, particularly in describing the computational architecture of the
system.

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jballanc
I'll be quite honest: I'm sure that Wolfram has made something truly, honestly
amazing and perhaps even beautiful...to a geek. Much like one artist can
appreciate the time and dedication required by another artist in creating a
complex work, to the lay person it's still just random splotches of color.

In fact, reading this review I'm reminded of the article about Git and merge
algorithms that was on the front page recently. In all likelihood, Alpha will
be amazing at what it does, without anyone worrying whether what it does is
what people want. Maybe people like Google because it's fast and reasonably
accurate, and the human brain is still a really amazing filter once you narrow
down the data set sufficiently.

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amichail
Would you trust any of the answers returned by such a system? Or would you
double check them on Google?

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gaius
I'd hope so. Every time you get on a plane you're trusting the answers
returned by Mathematica :-)

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Rod
Probably MATLAB instead of Mathematica. Control Systems, Communication
Systems, Structural Engineering, Engines, Vibration Analysis,... all within
MATLAB's domain, right? Am I missing something?

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gaius
MATLAB certainly is the leader in the field, but Mathematica does finite
element, control systems, etc.

Anyway, the point is, when it comes to being "trusted" there are a lot of
software companies and products who Google doesn't really compare to.

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Rod
As any other engineer, I have used MATLAB quite a lot. Unfortunately I am not
as familiarized with Mathematica. I thought Mathematica was mostly symbolic
computation. I didn't know it did numerical computation (such as FEM) as well.
Thanks for the info!

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andreyf
If it's so impressive, then why does it need so much hype? Just release it
already...

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programnature
If this was your startup, would you be saying no to the publicity? There is
such a thing as too much hype, but so far all I've seen is 1 blog post from
wolfram, and 2 posts from people he showed it too. There is no need to
begrudge the fact that its generating buzz. If it fails to live up to what the
'primary sources' are saying is another matter...

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andreyf
If this were another web2.0 startup, I would have no problem. But this is also
research. It seems a bit strange to rave about a research project without
letting people judge it for themselves.

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theklub
Anyone else feeling like this could turn out to be another Cuil? I'm afraid it
won't live up to the initial hype and then everyone will lose trust/interest
in it.

I do hope it's everything it claims to be though.

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trapper
After this I am really looking forward to the public release. Go alpha!

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asciilifeform
Where is the Eurisko source code, Dr. Lenat?

Did it ever even exist?

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malkia
Btw, there is now Mathematic Home Edition for only $300, with the same
capabilities of the normal one, with one limitation - it can't be used in
commercial setting.

