Wolfram Alpha is Coming -- and It Could be as Important as Google (opens in new tab)

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

http://tones.wolfram.com/

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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...

"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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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?

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

eg: http://is.gd/mnQw

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

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.

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.

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