

Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming - bdfh42
http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/03/05/wolframalpha-is-coming/

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dschobel
I wish he provided more technical detail as to what differentiates this from
every other attempt at exposing a general learning algorithm + NLP to the web.
Beside the Wolfram brand-name, there's little reason to elevate this above
'curiosity I'll watch out of the corner of my eye' status.

~~~
jerf
It sounded to me like it was "This problem requires both brute force and
cleverness, and I have supplied both.":

"But with a mixture of Mathematica and NKS automation, and a lot of human
experts, I’m happy to say that we’ve gotten a very long way.... But I’m happy
to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of
linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some
serious theoretical breakthroughs, we’re actually managing to make it work."

(Ellipses covers several paragraphs in this case.)

The big stopper in some sense has not been the cleverness, but the brute force
necessary, because without the brute force collection and translation, there's
nothing to be clever with. I, too, am "wait and see", but this could be
valuable.

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Keyframe
<http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/>

edit:

found out this little gem - Sergey Brin, before google, was an intern at
Wolfram

source: <http://mathworld.wolfram.com/news/2004-10-13/google/>

and a letter from feynman to wolfram (only res I could find)
[http://bp3.blogger.com/_6pUR-
THE-y4/Rh0pW_ZhckI/AAAAAAAAACI/...](http://bp3.blogger.com/_6pUR-
THE-y4/Rh0pW_ZhckI/AAAAAAAAACI/ug0tK70345k/s1600-h/feynman2wolfram.gif)

~~~
madcaptenor
Where's the Feynman letter from?

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carterschonwald
Sounds like a sequel to the Cyc project, but with more resources being thrown
at it

~~~
jonmc12
Nope, Cyc was built off a ridiculously complicated upper ontology using $80M+
over 25 years.

~~~
tectonic
Who uses Cyc?

~~~
glymor
Apparently various parts of the US security apparatus.

Google Techtalk by Dr. Lenat
<http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-7704388615049492068>

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ShardPhoenix
I wonder if this is actually going to work, or if it's going to be like every
other failed attempt at this kind of thing - ie amusing at first but far too
limited to be genuinely useful.

~~~
programnature
the difference in approach is outlined in the following paragraphs:

"But what about all the actual knowledge that we as humans have accumulated? A
lot of it is now on the web—in billions of pages of text. And with search
engines, we can very efficiently search for specific terms and phrases in that
text. But we can’t compute from that. And in effect, we can only answer
questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things up, but we
can’t figure anything new out. So how can we deal with that? Well, some people
have thought the way forward must be to somehow automatically understand the
natural language that exists on the web. Perhaps getting the web semantically
tagged to make that easier. But armed with Mathematica and NKS I realized
there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms,
and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable."

(eg, the crucial formula is algorithms to compute further information from
curated, trusted data)

~~~
dschobel
so he scripted google and fed it all into a learning algorithm?

~~~
programnature
what is meant by curated data is the opposite of what google does, eg
[http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/NewIn70Comput...](http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/NewIn70ComputableData.html)

(google has pretty much admitted it does a horrible job with structured
information...)

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andreyf
Sounds hype-ish, and loose on details... why are they doing this on their own,
not publishing it in peer-reviewed journals?

~~~
jcl
That's just the way the Wolf-man rolls.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science#Methodolo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science#Methodology)

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k0n2ad
Are they going to call the beta version "Wolfram|Alpha Beta?"

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ShabbyDoo
I'm reminded of the hype surrounding Cuil. So, does this system do anything
for my mom? She's not really the math-y sort. From Wolfram's blog post, I
wasn't able to determine what's in it for me. Or, are we way too early for
that?

~~~
DaniFong
It seems to me like a cross between Wikipedia with curated data, Mathematica,
and Google Calculator. You can ask it a wide variety of things, in natural
language, and it is supposed to get the answer right fairly often. We'll see.

~~~
Avshalom
The important thing being that you can ask it new and novel questions. it
sounds in fact something like
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_ratiocinator> as interpreted in The
Baroque Cycle

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petejackson
Building knowledge on top of the huge algorithmic base of Mathematica, gives
this a fighting chance of doing something significant.

~~~
evgen
Why? Mathematica does not have access to magical algorithms that none of the
rest of us know about, nor does it have any particular performance benefits
when it comes to implementing specific algorithms. It is a great exploratory
tool and an exceptional "generalist" in computer mathematics, but beyond that
it does not offers much that can't be done better/faster by a couple of smart
people writing some tight application-specific code.

~~~
dfranke
> Mathematica does not have access to magical algorithms that none of the rest
> of us know about

Yes it does. Quite a lot of them, especially w.r.t. symbolic equation-solving
and integration. They're notoriously protective of their trade secrets.

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palish
So what exactly can be done with a system like this? What types of problems
does it solve?

~~~
richardw
First, we will ask it what problems it would like to solve.

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run_zeno_run
So it seems to me that alpha is going to try to create mathematical models
from unstructured data found on the web and match them with similar models
generated from natural language queries entered by the users. I'm sure
probabilistic NLP methods are used extensively and I can see maybe how
Mathematica can compute these quickly. But what the bleep is the role of NKS?
From what little I know, I can speculate that he might have modeled
statistical inference using CAs and so can constrain the probability space of
matches?? Jebus I need to know more or forget what I know already, anything in
between is frustrating.

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amichail
I respect Wolfram because he has the means to do whatever he likes, even if
everyone else thinks it's crazy. That's real academic freedom.

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asciilifeform
Obligatory Wolfram primer:

1) <http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/>

2)
[http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math/msg/37f51351f5340e58...](http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math/msg/37f51351f5340e58?dmode=source)

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joshu
Doesn't look like Wolfram|Alpha is even breathing hard.

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gaius
That's all well and good, but when will Mathematica Home Edition be available
in the UK so we can play with this stuff ourselves?

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rudyfink
I do hope they improve the color scheme and the "computational knowledge
search engine" tag line.

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gorm
Exited and interesting approach. Adding more schematic will help such a system
so it's working with time. Also seems to have the right kind of mad
scientists.

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Dilpil
Is Wolfram the new Xerox Parc?

