

Wolfram Alpha Architecture - drp
http://highscalability.com/wolfram-alpha-architecture

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ulf
Misleading title again, no really interesting details...

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drp
I thought the claim that they've created the 44th most powerful supercomputer
to power their searches was rather interesting.

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mojuba
His other web site he mentions here:

<http://tones.wolfram.com/>

is just pathetic.

I wrote a jazz improvization machine 18 years ago which played more sensible
music some jazz fans even kind of liked, but it was as useless as this "new
kind of" crap.

Music is an abstract language we, humans, speak to express ourselves. You
can't touch hearts and souls by generating random sequences within a given
scale.

I hope Alpha turns out to be more useful, but good Lord, this man's narcissism
case should be included in psychology textbooks.

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endtime
>Music is an abstract language we, humans, speak to express ourselves. You
can't touch hearts and souls by generating random sequences within a given
scale.

What if you randomly generated something that was identical to a famous piece
of music? Is there a reason why that couldn't happen? And, if not, recognize
that it doesn't actually depend on the prior human creation of the piece...so
I don't see why, in theory, you couldn't randomly generate (or grow via GA or
whatever) a good piece of music.

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mojuba
Music is not just notes. With the exception of some of the modern genres
(dance/electronica mostly) music is performed by people and truly good music
has nuances not seen in the scores.

There are performances of Bach that I'd turn off after 20 seconds, and there
are those I keep in my music collection for years, if not decades. Performaces
differ dramatically.

Or take Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here - was it the scores, or rather
Gilmour's unique articulation on the guitar that made us listen to this album?
How about John Coltrane's emotional outbursts on the sax? Nina Simone's
cosmic-deep vocals?

Music is a far more subtle art, not yet understood from the point of view of
Cognitive Science. What random notes are you talking about?

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crescendo
If you keep generating random series of tones, eventually you will end up with
Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here or any other piece ever recorded.

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mojuba
That's probably a very clever way of producing music, but I don't want to wait
billions of years until an awesome performance of Mozart's concerto No.17
emerges from your machine. I want it now, please. Thank you.

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endtime
Right, but with good heuristics it wouldn't take billions of years to generate
a good piece of music. Anyway, there's a difference between something being
impossible and something requiring a large amount of time.

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mojuba
Heuristics - you mean, you know how we perceive music? Can you explain what
makes a piece of music good? Same for performance - why are some performances
of the same piece of music better than others?

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endtime
If I could explain what made a piece of music could I could write a direct
algorithm. The kind of heuristic I mean is something that would rule out the
vast majority of dissonant crap that has no chance of sounding good.

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mojuba
A lot of what was believed to be "dissonant crap" some 50 years ago is now
part of jazz and avantgarde. Many jazz fans value Thelonious Monk's music, for
example, more than any popular harmonious crap. Obviously you are not familiar
with music. Good luck in exploring it before you try to formalize it.

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endtime
I think you are still missing the point. Would you not agree that in the
entire space of all possible sequences of noise, the vast majority could never
be considered music?

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mojuba
Ok, you can omit noise and leave only the chromatic scale (12 notes). In this
space you will have to go through all possible combinations of notes in a
chord and then all possible sequences of chords for some, say, 16 bars, plus
you have to generate the theme on top of your chords (or the theme first and
then the chords - that will do too). Then possibly variations, improvizations,
and so on. Then there may be deliberate "detuned" elements, like in Gilmour's
solo improvizations or Nina Simone's vocals. This looks like a huge tree for
your search.

To add complexity, in some modern genres like electronica musicians also
express themselves using timbre dynamics combined with notes.

But apart from that, there's a problem with identifying automatically which of
your variants you generated are good, which comes down to what is good music.

Then performance. We usually appreciate good performance and a lot of people
are not interested in hearing precise robotic play. Again, what makes a
performance good? Nobody knows, there's no theory.

Having said that, what's the point of doing tree search at all?

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sdfgfdgfd
I dont get what walpha has to do with ankos. Is it just for the hype? I doubt
walpha uses cellular automata to create the answers.

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sachmanb
im amused that the highscalability.com domain being linked to is not
responding to my web request. timed out too many times. i'll heed ulf's
comment and move on. if it's that good, i'm sure it'll come up 20 more
times....

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huhtenberg
The interesting part of their article is a trivial rehash of this one:

[http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/12/the-computers-
poweri...](http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/12/the-computers-powering-
computable-knowledge/)

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jaydub
For co-located servers who pays the energy bill?

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wmf
Usually the data center charges a certain rate for each circuit and the
customer can consume as much or as little as they want (short of blowing the
breaker).

