

Wolfram Alpha Demo by Stephen Wolfram [screencast] - mlLK
http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

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swombat
This video is insane. If Alpha can do the stuff in this video, it's a
revolutionary upgrade to human thought.

I don't think I'm exaggerating. Making this available to the world for free
will probably make as much of a difference to human thought and progress as
Google has, if not more.

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randallsquared
My worry is that this stuff was cherry-picked. Also, like Google (at least at
first), this is going to be most useful to the people who think like the
creators. I remember when Google appeared, some people (me, f'r instance) were
able to get great results nearly every time, and other people seemed not to
get the results they were looking for even after repeated attempts to refine
the search. This effect lessened after a while, but Wolfram Alpha appears to
have it in spades. I mean, "What is the GDP of France / Italy" _clearly_ means
to display a comparison of the GDPs of France and Italy, not to do some
division producing a result that doesn't seem to have any relevance to
anything... :)

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Timothee
I agree. I don't see how it could work so nicely for everything. Though it
seems that he picked a specific category (Mathematica) which helps quite a lot
on what to do with the query.

Take the example with the first names: "Andrew", then "Andrew John" (or
whatever it was) which compares the two names over the years. What happens if
I type "Elton John" now?

The screencast was impressive but I'd like to try it by myself (which should
be soon apparently) to realize how powerful it can be.

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misuba
That everpresent "Mathematica" blurb on the screens doesn't represent any kind
of site category, I don't think; the whole site is driven by Mathematica
behind the scenes. The Mathematica link often visible looks like it goes to
some sort of representation of that behind-the-scenes stuff, but that's just a
guess.

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Timothee
Oh ok, thanks for the info. Since I saw a big list of categories at the end of
the screencast and remembered that "Mathematica" was there all along, I
figured there was something to it. I just have a hard time believing that that
kind of results can be achieved without more information than the keywords.

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abossy
Repeat post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607532>

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mlLK
This ain't no search engine. It's something else altogether.

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jimbokun
Yes, it is a computational knowledge engine. :)

Which I think is a pretty good label, actually. It is taking all the kind of
information found in the big reference books in your library (atlases,
dictionaries, science reference, etc.) and making it searchable through
queries and inferences and calculations.

I agree that the people comparing it to Google are off the mark. This demo
does not compare it to Google in any way. I like at the end they show a page
with the kinds of things Alpha knows about. It would be very frustrating
trying to guess what it knows or not by typing in random queries.

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asciilifeform
To my fellow beta-testers (I'm sure some of you are here): have any of you
found an _actual productive use_ for Alpha? Scratch that, has anyone here used
it "in anger", even once? I've been trying, so far, to no avail. (I have a
copy of Mathematica, so use cases which intersect with that app's existing
features are not of interest to me.)

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rjurney
I'm not a beta user, but offhand I would use it in my daily research to
compare nations and economies, fact check articles on the economy, weather,
etc. To contextualize, compare and analyze random factoids I come across daily
but don't really understand.

Does it not actually work well for that?

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zandorg
This is incredible if it's built on New Kind of Science (game of life, etc -
see Hackers by Steven Levy), but if it's just entered by hand, then it's
merely useful.

One thing I can forgive is that you have to learn what you can do, you can't
just sit down and use it. You need to read the manual.

I also totally dug his English accent, except for the term 'math' which show's
he's mostly American. ;-)

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ryanwaggoner
This is incredible. What I'd really like to see is something like this hooked
up to a top quality voice recognition system and voice synthesis. So when I'm
driving, or walking down the street, or working at my whiteboard, or whatever,
I can answer those dumb little questions that always pop into my head.

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brown9-2
Is it a bad sign for Wolfram if the screencast shows me "Loading Controls:
NaN%" in Chrome?

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judofyr
I think it's a joke.

