

Stephen Wolfram on how Alpha is being refined technically - anigbrowl
http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/08/20/what-weve-been-doing-this-summer/

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ghshephard
What I find amazing about Wolfram Alpha is that _despite_ sitting down with a
pad of paper, and a spare 30 minutes, I'm _still_ unable to get most of my
_completely domain relevant_ queries answered by it.

For example - I want a graph of the price of gold versus the price of silver
over time. This should be _precisely_ what Wolfram Alpha is good at. In the
Demo they even show the ability of Wolfram Alpha to show the price of gold.

The following does not work:

    
    
      Price of Gold versus Price of Silver
      Price of Gold Divided by Price of Silver
      Silver Futures Divided by Price of Silver
      NYMEX:SI versus NYMEX:GC
      NYMEX:SI NYMEX:GC
      Graph Price of Gold
      Graph Price of Gold Over Time
    

Now, switch to google, and type in

    
    
      Price of Gold 
    

and the first hit is: "<http://goldprice.org/live-gold-price.html>

And 10 seconds later I have an overlayed Price of Gold/Silver Chart.

If Google is able to go Head-Head with Wolfram alpha, in the Wolfram Alpha
_domain_ - then it's got a long time to go before it's a query engine of
choice for people.

But - I admire them for their perseverance, and it will be interesting to see
how it evolves over the next few years - the good news is that the barrier to
entry is likely to be insanely high by the time they finally get it working...

~~~
grandinj
Maybe that's because the answer to the question you're asking is NaN.

What you actually mean is that you want a plot of the price of gold and the
price of silver vs time.

For which the query is: gold and silver price history

Took me about 5 minutes of playing around.

~~~
apotheon
. . . which still seems to be about 4:50 longer than it takes with Google.

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ori_b
I would just be happy if they dropped the natural language queries and gave me
a heirarchical view of what's in it, filterable by keyword. Maybe give me a
simple and well defined query language.

The fuzziness of natural language input always annoyed me.

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cool-RR
From the article: _"I just looked up what’s actually happened to the
Wolfram|Alpha codebase since launch. And I have to say that I’m quite
astonished: it’s grown by a staggering 52%—adding well over 2 million lines of
Mathematica code."_

2 _million_. Jesus.

~~~
apotheon
He mentions that number like he thinks that's a _good_ thing.

~~~
simonb
Keep in mind the data is described in Mathematica as well.

~~~
apotheon
Even if the data is represented in the same form as the code, mixing the two
isn't really a great idea, in my opinion.

edit: . . . and if that's all the data they've added, they're moving too
slowly.

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jrockway
By being rewritten in Erlang?

~~~
anigbrowl
Things I didn't know #11,376 <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=erlang>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_distribution>

Also:
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=why+arent+you+written+i...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=why+arent+you+written+in+erlang)

8-o

~~~
MaysonL
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=erlang&a=*C.erlang-...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=erlang&a=*C.erlang-_*Word-)

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sachinag
I'm entirely convinced that Wolfram Research only hires UX people from SAP.

EDIT: And this thought made me send my resume to them. Alpha is the sort of
project that people seem to root for - unlike, say, Cuil - and I think it's
because people see the germ of something special there. But patience isn't
infinite. Can't be a hater all the time.

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tjmc
Alpha still has an annoying bug where it processes input perfectly but and
then doesn't compute anything. I tried this 3 months ago: "4.7L/100km to mpg"
and the result is still the same - Alpha elegantly rephrases what I've asked
for but then tells me nothing. Google just produces the answer.

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carterschonwald
I don't see how anything in the book NKS can be remotely related to robust
natural language parsing as is claimed in the article, am I missing something
or not?

~~~
mr_luc
Let me pull something completely out of my butt:

Each word is an element; the transition rules are simple substitution with
synonyms; multiway system; at each step, it examines to see if the pattern has
resolved into a pattern it knows how to recognize.

I know, I know, that's naive and not robust at all. :(

I'm just sayin'. I'd have had a hard time seeing how you'd use ca to write
cell phone ring tones -- and not just completely random ones, either, but the
way wolframtones does it.

The dude has a serious affinity for that stuff. It's like he's ONLY able to
see the world through CA. (Still, probably a net win for humanity to have one
person like that in each field at least).

~~~
gjm11
_Let me pull something completely out of my butt_

Yup, that is most likely exactly how Wolfram claims that "NKS" has anything
much to do with anything useful Alpha does.

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chrischen
What's next? Do my English homework too?

