

Wolfram Alpha is Coming -- and It Could be as Important as Google - toffer
http://www.twine.com/item/122mz8lz9-4c/wolfram-alpha-is-coming-and-it-could-be-as-important-as-google

======
ivankirigin
For a system like this, I've been trained through repeated disappointments to
ignore hype and only look at results. I might also be influenced by knowing a
bit about AI.

    
    
      it doesn't use natural language processing, it *computes* the answer. 
    

Gibberish

~~~
j2d2
It wouldn't be the first time the world was promised something from Wolfram
that went basically nowhere.

~~~
sketerpot
On the other hand, Mathematica is pretty cool. Wolfram is a clever guy with a
lot of money. That's worth something.

~~~
spot
mathematica is a reimplementation of similar systems that were already proven
to work. alpha is a reimplementation of similar systems that were proven not
to work.

~~~
raganwald
Ah, the "witty put down" at its finest! While nothing of this sort has worked
to date, the same could have been said of powered flight on December 16, 1903.
In any event... Thanks for making me smile :-)

------
hypersoar
I had a chance to see this in action a while back. While I, and none of the
people I saw this with, were not at all impressed by NKS, this project blew
our minds. We watched as it pulled up and manipulated everything from Egyption
fraction expansions to historic weather data to the human genome. If the
author of this article is exaggerating, it's not by a whole lot. While Wolfram
may not be bringing about the revolution in science he hoped to, don't forget
that he and his crew made Mathematica, and are very capable of creating
impressive software.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I _want_ to believe you, but the fact that you signed up just to leave this
comment anonymously doesn't do much to alleviate my skepticism.

~~~
hypersoar
Yeah, I know it looks suspicious. I've been lurking around here for a while,
but hadn't really been compelled to comment before. I'm happy to try and
answer questions about what I saw, but it was a while ago, so I don't remember
the details that well.

------
shimonamit
Sounds like another Cuil hype type campaign. When Google came out they didn't
make any claims. Only factual performance counts.

~~~
anamax
> When Google came out they didn't make any claims. Only factual performance
> counts.

A cite to some Google claims when they came out would be nice. (Academic
papers don't count.)

I was in the SF Bay Area at the time and the "publicity" that I remember was
friends saying "check this out". I don't recall Google saying anything beyond
"here's how many pages we indexed".

~~~
shadytrees
> I don't recall Google saying anything beyond "here's how many pages we
> indexed".

I think that's the point shimonamit is making.

------
newy
If all Wolfram will be spitting back is an answer, I'm wondering how the user
will determine the answer's correctness. Will there be a "proof" of some sort,
or a list of references for the underlying facts and assumptions. With
information found via Google, at the very least you'll be able to assess the
reliability of the author/source (random message board v. NYTimes article) -
not saying this is perfect, but a good measure.

------
petercooper
Let's not get too excited here. Generally, stuff that's hyped up _before_ it
launches tends to suck.

Was Twitter hyped up like this before it launched? Facebook? Google?
Microsoft? Apple? TechCrunch? Hacker News? Wikipedia? Heck, pretty much
ANYTHING that's successful now? (Even small stuff like Balsamiq that's
currently very successful in a small way wasn't hyped _before_ it launched).

Now think of stuff that _was_ hyped massively before launch. Cuil. Powerset.
Yeah.

Stuff that ultimately becomes super successful becomes successful over quite a
long period of time and due to the excitement of users _after_ launch - not
the bleatings of gurus before launch.

------
aaronsw
Wolfram Alpha is coming -- and It Could be as Imporant as WolframTones!

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

------
jedc
There's already a company beta-testing this core technology: TrueKnowledge,
based in Cambridge (UK).

<http://www.trueknowledge.com/technology/>

It's an interesting concept, and has much broader applications through their
API.

~~~
shafqat
TrueKnowledge has been doing this for a while now... And they do it well. Did
it change the world? No. I call BS on this article.

------
nickb
Or it could be as unimportant as Powerset. It's best not to hype it up too
much since the odds are that it won't be a panacea to everyone and a lot of
people will be disappointed.

Products that tend to be modest initially and improve and prove themselves
rapidly tend to do better than products that are hyped up beyond all
proportions.

~~~
Hexstream
Indeed, why hype a product that is so insanely great the news will spread
practically by itself? I expect a product to be worthless if its hype goes
beyond a certain treshold.

------
ggchappell
Knowing no more about this than the PR thus far, I am pessimistic, but for not
quite the same reason as some other commenters.

I think a couple of things are clear.

(1) We are at the point where something impressive is likely to be able to be
produced, and Wolfram may very well have the resources to do it.

(2) We are _not_ at the point where the be-all-end-all version of this can be
produced.

Compare this with the symbolic computation packages (Mathematica, Maple,
etc.). Around 1990, we were at the point where we could produce a very good
one. Several were written. They have been improved since, but only marginally.
We're still pretty much using 1990 technology.

And that's fine. We knew how to make a really good symbolic computation
package. We did. End of story.

But consider the proposed packages (Alpha, etc.). We might produce something
impressive. But we are _not_ ready to produce something _really_ _good_ and
_useful_. Our initial efforts will require lots of improving.

And Wolfram is definitely not the one to do that improving. He runs an
aggressively closed shop. Always has. I predict, therefore, that the
cathedral-bazaar effect is going to mean his product will be difficult to
improve, and so will never become truly useful.

~~~
gfodor
This too is my concern. The guy is brilliant, but I really feel technology
like this can only reach its full potential by being open and extendible by
domain experts. Hopefully Wolfram realizes this as well -- it sounds like he
has put forth significant effort and money bootstrapping the engine with
knowledge and so on, hopefully he passes the torch to the rest of the world
and doesn't propose his company be the only source of information into this
engine.

If he provides not just technology and data but also the means to extend that
technology and data by following his example he might be contributing
something truly revolutionary.

------
nate
I said something similar about A New Kind of Science, and that was
ridiculously underwhelming. I respect Wolfram like crazy, but I want my money
back on that thing :)

~~~
davidbnewquist
Do you feel that Wolfram can rightly claim the thesis offered and explored in
the book? Regardless, how well do you think he supported the thesis?

The thesis of A New Kind of Science is something like "systems comprised of a
small number of simple rules can perform arbitrarily complex computations."

The book proceeds to support the thesis. The content is comprised of
descriptions of such systems, corresponding Mathematica execution trace
diagrams, and analysis. These analyses are related to a ambitiously large
scope of natural phenomenon and scientific knowledge.

------
fiaz
Excellent article describing what could be the biggest advance in the web
since the launch of Google. However, I wonder if it will be inundated with 99%
of the questions being about who Miley Cyrus's current boyfriend is - or some
other frivolous usage.

Seems to me that this technology should have been released for some other
scientific usage first (if it is indeed that powerful). It could be valuable
as an engine for other applications as well in this manner.

I would also argue that one of Google's advantages is that it enables
discovery of new information instead of just giving you the one page you for
which you are looking.

~~~
anamax
Successful search engines are innundated with questions about what its users
care about.

> Seems to me that this technology should have been released for some other
> scientific usage first

Why?

Technologists need to get over the idea that technology is for
science/technology.

> I would also argue that one of Google's advantages is that it enables
> discovery of new information instead of just giving you the one page you for
> which you are looking.

Huh? If there isn't a page that states which city is the fourth largest in
eastern Montana, how will Google help you answer that question? (No fair going
to the "populations of cities in eastern montana" page.)

Google doesn't (yet) do join queries.

------
tconfrey
Sounds a lot like what cyc (<http://www.cyc.com/cyc/company/about>) has been
trying to do for the last 25 years and actually the holy grail of AI since the
50s.

I think its still way out of reach for non-trivial data-sets. Something like
this doesn't just show up out of the blue, its not a problem amenable to some
single new algorithm or breakthrough.

------
ntoshev
I don't think a formal system with symbolic inference is useful for describing
the knowledge of any reasonably complex domain that doesn't have a
mathematical model. And most of the human knowledge tends to be like this.

I'd love to be proven wrong...

~~~
larryfreeman
Your statement is a tautology.

A domain that doesn't have a mathematical model would not be describable by a
formal system.

And likewise, any domain describable by a formal system would have a
mathematical model.

~~~
alain94040
I'll add another tautology to counteract your argument: isn't it true that any
domain that can be described by a formal system is essentially equivalent to
mathematics?

Which brings us back to the original point: human stuff is not very math-
friendly. I want to deal with emotions, politics, etc.

Think Bush and torture: can this system give me any definitive answers?

~~~
larryfreeman
Your logic is not correct here

You would be correct if you said:

"Isn't it true that any domain that can be described a formal system is also
describable by mathematics."

If I have a friend Joe who is largely predictable then in certain situations,
he is describable by a mathematical system (a logical system).

His full set of actions go beyond mathematics and if Joe realized how
predictable he was, he might stop being so predictable.

Describable by mathematics does not mean "essentially equivalent" to
mathematics.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
And when Joe started doing something new, you'd just extend your formal system
to include all of Joe's new behaviors. Given enough symbolic content, no
matter what Joe comes up with, you can model it.

Just like we extended our formal number system into negatives, imaginaries,
quaternions, etc.

Math is a terrifically abstract, self-consistent model of reality. But that's
all it is: a model. Sometimes the model tells us things we didn't know before,
and sometimes we have to change the model to make it work with what we're
observing.

~~~
larryfreeman
I don't think so. My assumption is that Joe is predictable by a mathematical
equation. I find that this is only true of certain people and only true in
certain circumstances.

People, in general, operate the opposite of computers. We don't think about
what we should do, we think about we shouldn't do. So, it is very hard, if not
impossible, to represent human behavior by a mathematical system.

This argument is explored in great detail in the book: Godel, Escher, Bach.

------
snorkel
"Wolfram Alpha is not HAL 9000, and it wasn't intended to be. It doesn't have
a sense of self or opinions or feelings."

Too bad for that because right away I was thinking "Wow! It's a sentient
version of Google only a bazillion times better!" but then I realized it's
just a parser that turns natural language questions into queries against a
large dataset then I became all sad and disappointed.

------
raphar
How will they prevent malicious questions such as prime number factorization,
np problems, from eating all processing time?? Im asking it seriously! At
least they have to enumerate all these questions to prevent system abuse.
Funnyly "The Last Question", Asimov's short story also comes to my mind.

------
dfj225
I wonder how useful this will be if you can only ask a single question or a
set of questions that can be easily expressed in single line text field?

If I'm asking something like, "What is the capitol of Nebraska?" why not just
get directed to the Wikipedia entry where I can learn a lot more than the one
fact that answers what I just asked?

If Alpha is actually going to do computation, I'd rather be able to use it for
something more complex than a single natural language query.

------
3ds
I don't think it's gibberish.

I would love to gather _good_ questions and discuss the results when they are
available. I think it is important to find questions to which google, yahoo,
powerset or wikipedia don't provide a straight answer.

How about:

1) What is the smallest unknown prime number? ;)

2) Where on earth is the rainy days to sunny days ratio the lowest?

3) How many languages does the average person from the Benelux countries
speak?

------
moe
I predict this product will score at the very least 3 cuils.

But heck, I wouldn't even be surprised if they push the scale, 7 cuils anyone?

<http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory>

~~~
trominos
Please, please stop with the "cuil theory" meme. It's dumb.

------
voidpointer
The other big question: will they hardwire it to come up with "42" for "the
answer to life, the universe, and everything" or will it actually source that
"fact" from the web?

------
pclark
doesn't Google do a pretty good job at answering facts?

eg: <http://is.gd/mnQw>

~~~
teamonkey
If you ask Google "What is the capital city of the country that has the 15th
highest average rainfall in the world?" then you don't get a straight answer.

This software should be able to look up rainfall data from Stephan Wolfram's
Bumper Book of Trivia, work out average rainfall for each country, work out
which country has the 15th-highest rainfall from that result, then look up the
capital city for that country.

All determinable facts with a straight answer; you should simply get the name
of the city as a result.

~~~
russell
I tried the query and the top of the list is the parent comment. (Google seems
to be paying close attention to HN.) The second was an article about Uruguay
which said it was colonized from Spain in the 15th century. Google replied
with any old 15th. (The article is actually wrong. It was settled in 1536.)

The parent posting is correct. Google is particularly poor at complex
questions, especially if you aren't sure about the exact phrasing. I have had
several queries in the past couple of weeks where I have had to spend 30 to 90
minutes trying to get the right set of terms to return the right set of
documents to look at. This is particularly true if the name of the product is
a common English word.

------
goodgoblin
First question: What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

------
TweedHeads
If there is only one answer to one factual question, why not have it already
written and available like wikipedia?

Practically speaking, static content that doesn't change often is better
served by models like wikipedia.

If Wolfram knows all the answers, write them all in static html for the world
to use, search, browse, replicate and extend instead of stored on semantic
databases or ethereal brains.

I am not pissing on their parade, I know the scientific work is commendable,
but practically speaking it can't compete with more efficient models.

~~~
anamax
> If there is only one answer to one factual question, why not have it already
> written and available like wikipedia?

Wikipedia isn't all that useful for storing all of the sums of integers.

In other words, you can't enumerate all of the questions that have one answer.

~~~
TweedHeads
Google 2+2

Not to be a dickhead, I know what you mean.

Questions that involve some kind of processing power can be a good target for
Wolfram, but then, how much marketable besides academia?

The answer to the population of X country/city/town = wikipedia, plus more
facts you may be interested while doing your research paper.

Maybe I just need 10 different questions/implementations of such service to
get it.

~~~
logicalmind
Couldn't you just do this:

askwolfram "What are all of the questions that will ever be asked?" |
askwolfram "How do I format this answer for wikipedia?" > wikipedia.html

------
moonpolysoft
Gödel might have said something about the possibility of a universal inference
engine.

Like TrueKnowledge and the Freebase answers in Powerset, this system will
likely be good at answering a small subset of very direct questions. Having
access to Mathematica's symbolic solver algorithms would definitely help in
building this system.

If it's successful it will either be faster than current inference engines, or
capable of solving more complex queries. Or perhaps both. We'll see.

------
tphyahoo
This would be slightly more impressive if it actually had a... demo.

