
An inside look at Stephen Wolfram's computational paradigm - codelion
http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/29/sentient-code-an-inside-look-at-stephen-wolframs-utterly-new-insanely-ambitious-computational-paradigm/
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snowwrestler
The problem with covering claims of changing paradigms is: who is qualified to
evaluate such ambitious claims? Realistically, not many folks.

I think the best thing for a reporter to do is to connect the appropriate
experts together to build a balanced story. Yes, spend time with Wolfram, take
good notes etc.--but then find the right experts to respond to and evaluate
what he said.

To me, this story reads a bit too credulous to be really useful in
understanding what Wolfram is claiming. I read Wolfram's blog post already,
and this story seems about the same in tone and content.

What I want to see is the equivalant of this [1] article: a cranky review by
an expert in the field...with citations.

[1]
[http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfra...](http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/)

~~~
Houshalter
Isn't that what hacker news comments are for?

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wrongc0ntinent
Wolfram is a master at this game. You can't deny the brilliant stuff he's
done; throw in new terminology for unoriginal concepts, and it becomes very
hard to call a bluff (or a delusion). Edit: or confirm.

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drakaal
I am really excited about this. Combining their API with the NLP stuff we are
building cool things would be even simpler.

Our engine turns things like "How many people are living in China right now"
in to { "action": "query", "project": [ "population" ], "model":
"geopolitics", "payload": { "country_code": "CN" } }

We can do more complex things, but I figure pasting huge code examples in to
HN is frowned upon.

Combining our ability to create structured queries with Wolfram's ability to
do amazing visualizations could result in some amazing things.

We are looking at basically having the Star Trek computer in terms of being
able to say. "How many times more men live in China than in the US" and have
our data create a query that Wolfram would visualize by taking the number of
men in china and dividing by the number of men in the United States.

Or taking it a step further... "let me know" our version of "If this then
that" could be really impressive with this kind of data. "Let me know if there
is rain anywhere on my route from San Diego to San Francisco Tomorrow"

We have already started to do some of this at
[http://plexivoice.com](http://plexivoice.com) but ties to Wolfram will make
it even more surreal.

~~~
tree_of_item
If it's not too much trouble, could you put some of these huge code examples
in a blog post or something?

I get the sense that a lot of people (myself included) are still a little
confused as to what "Wolfram Language" _is_ exactly, and maybe some code from
someone who sees value in it would help clarify things.

~~~
drakaal
I will get a blog post up soon, and will update this thread.

I think part of the problem is Wolfram named it poorly.

Think "Ultimate Mashup Tool with a relatively easy interface for building the
mashups"

I'm excited because with my NLP stuff it can be "Mashups built with your
voice" or "Mashups your Grandma can build"

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DanielBMarkham
Sidebar:

Argh.

I've played with alpha several times and each time gave up in frustration.

Just now I wanted to know "What's the history of the closing price of the Dow
Jones Industrial Average in ounces of gold over the last 50 years?"

Spent 15 minutes fooling around. Finally got the pricing data in working
separate queries, but couldn't combine it. So I asked to download the files --
only to be bugged to sign up.

Must be a totally awesome system. I can't make heads or tails of it.

Meh.

~~~
nabla9
Was your intention to compare gold and DOW as investments for long term?

In that case you should ask question: "What is the price of Dow Jones
Industrial Average dividends reinvested in ounces of gold?"

In long term, the majority of value in stock markets comes from dividends.
That does not show in stock price graphs.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
No. I wanted to see how the stock market change would look if, instead of
being priced in dollars, it was priced in some form of commodity, like gold.

So if one day the index closed at 1000, and gold was 200/ounce, it would have
closed at 5 ounces.

Thanks for the help, though.

~~~
marvin
If not even nabla9 can understand what you were really asking, it shouldn't
come as a surprise that an NLP program couldn't ;)

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Mithaldu
"Use NLP to convert questions into code, which can not only retrieve data, but
also do parametrized computation on it."

This sounds to me to be the core here, simplified as far as possible.

Quite an undertaking, but if it gets rolling properly, it can actually end up
challenging Google. Imagine being able to ask the following question and get
an answer with summary and graph and maybe options to drill down, all computed
in response to the question, not pregenerated:

"How many people were living in China from 1950 to 1980?"

(Or don't imagine and just click:
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+many+people+were+li...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+many+people+were+living+in+China+from+1950+to+1980%3F)
)

~~~
snowwrestler
It's interesting computation, but how often is it useful to quickly estimate
how many people were living in China between 1950 and 1980?

Not to pick on that one example, but I do think this is part of the reason
that Wolfram Alpha has not taken off at consumer scale. It seems to me that
the things it can do that Google cannot, while technologically impressive, are
not particularly valuable to most people.

After completing their schooling, most people don't need to solve equations
every day. If they do, they already have ways of doing it (Mathematica, for
example).

And most people don't need to look up census data, or historical GDP tables,
or the location of the ISS. And if they do, they already have ways to do that.

Basically, Wolfram's approach seems like a great way to organize and make
useful knowledge that is fully known. But the most value is pushing the edge
of the unknown, and that means continuously taking in, indexing, and
presenting _new_ information. Facebook does this, Twitter does this, Stack
Overflow does this, etc....and Google indexes all of that.

~~~
MaulingMonkey
> And if they do, they already have ways to do that.

Disseparate ways that take awhile, with results from multiple sources that
need to be manually combined to figure out what information is worthwhile.
Some of the random queries I've tossed into WA:

"If the average mailbox size is 57MB, and I've only processed 65% of one in
the past half hour, how long is it going to take to proce ss all 80GB?" Q:
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=30+min+%2F+%2857MB+*+0....](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=30+min+%2F+%2857MB+*+0.65%29+%3D+x+month%2F+80GB)
A: ~1.5 months, better come up with an alternative

"How big is a gigasecond?" Q:
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+gigasecond](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+gigasecond)
A: ~1/3rd of a century

"Just how fast are my 5m/s Kerbal Space Program landings?" Q:
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=5m%2Fs+to+mph](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=5m%2Fs+to+mph)
A: "I've been rear ended at that speed"

"How much precision will a double give me at the radius of pluto?" Q:
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=orbit+radius+of+pluto+%...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=orbit+radius+of+pluto+%2F+%282+**+53%29)
A: "millimeter, perfect"

Or work related; "I'm having trouble visualizing these 3d points, please plot
them so I can get a better mental picture for why this right angle assertion
is triggering" "Divide by b squared? That can't be right..." when canceling
out terms in math code for efficiency, rearriving at one of the equations of
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_projection#Vector_projec...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_projection#Vector_projection_2)
. "I can't intuit the behavior of this math without graphing it out, lets
see... bounds... period... yeah that makes sense!"

I also use it for simpler calculations: "How do the prices of gold and
platinum stack up against each other?" "How long until sunset? Thanksgiving?"
"When is 18 KST in my timezone?" "How much is that in dollars?" "How big is an
acre?" "What does the compound interest on that look like?"

Some of these could be found through google... probably followed by trolling
the results for a specific calculator. Others I could calculate myself. But
most would be inconvenient enough without WA I wouldn't ask them. Some of
these are idle curiosity, but others have saved me significant time doing my
job. It's not a daily sort of thing, but it's a consistent way to answer these
oddball questions for myself.

Google was a tool I had to learn to turn to with my problems. It didn't used
to be my primary interface to all documentation, for example... slowly but
surely I turned to it more and more frequently. And so it is so far with me
and Wolfram Alpha.

~~~
flavor8
Still, there are significant holes in the parsing engine - once you learn its
quirks you can get around it, but it's a long way from natural. It can do, for
example:

"estimated number of atoms in a liter of water" \-
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=estimated+number+of+ato...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=estimated+number+of+atoms+in+a+liter+of+water)

and

"volume of a cup of coffee"
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+a+cup+of+coff...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+a+cup+of+coffee)

but not:

"estimated number of atoms in a cup of coffee"
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=estimated+number+of+ato...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=estimated+number+of+atoms+in+a+cup+of+coffee)

What you're looking for is: "estimated number of atoms in 1 cup of water".

Similarly "distance to moon in terms of bill gates' height" does NOT work,
while "distance to moon / bill gates' height" does work.

~~~
MaulingMonkey
Quite true.

Still, the same holds for Google as well - sometimes you need to avoid
relevant keywords because of the junk they'll bring in, other times you need
to add seemingly tangential keywords, and yet other times you need to resort
to google's syntax -- quotation marks, +/\- and site: prefixes. (alack, poor
+, we hardly knew ye)

Stumbling upon the right combination can take quite a bit of work until you've
built up experience with both the search engine and the subject material's
keywords.

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Keyframe
Judging by past wolfram hypes, I don't have any confidence in this at all to
be even a moderate success. I wish it would be true though, but we know it
won't happen. PR/BS ratio is high.

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chm
Bravo, but I have one question:

What exactly is the "utterly new, insanely ambitious computational paradigm"?

~~~
drakaal
The ability to create insane queries that leverage multiple data sets
seamlessly and provide a visualization. I gave some examples in my comment.

~~~
chm
Well, this is technically very difficult. I don't see how it is a new
"paradigm" though. It's just a next step in the same direction technology has
been heading, no?

~~~
judk
It's _A New Kind of Search-Engine_

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hcarvalhoalves
It's hard to figure out what the article is about underneath all the hype
coating.

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sbierwagen
Hrm.

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enupten
Wouldn't this be bad reproducibility wise ? I mean, the language spec is
essentially changing on a rolling basis.

