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Wolfram Alpha


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#1 Vgamer1

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Posted 12 March 2009 - 12:17 AM


Sounds hard to believe right? Well Stephen Wolfram says he's done it. The website it supposed to be up and running in May. Here's a blog written by the programmer himself:

http://blog.wolfram....lpha-is-coming/

It combines natural language processing and access to a huge amount of information. I wonder if it will be as badass as it sounds.

#2 jackinbox

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Posted 12 March 2009 - 01:05 AM

Sounds hard to believe right? Well Stephen Wolfram says he's done it. The website it supposed to be up and running in May. Here's a blog written by the programmer himself:

http://blog.wolfram....lpha-is-coming/

It combines natural language processing and access to a huge amount of information. I wonder if it will be as badass as it sounds.


Wolfram seems to be a kind of misunderstood genius. His book, A New Kind of Science, has been criticized for pretending to be revolutionary while not bringing anything new. In other words, some see him as a lunatic. If this system works, it will prove that NKS is something we should take seriously.

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#3 Shoe

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Posted 12 March 2009 - 02:36 AM

I really hope WA lives up to the hype. I mean, a software really computing answers instead of just looking them up in a large database? Almost sounds like "real" AI to me.

#4 Futurist1000

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Posted 16 March 2009 - 04:04 AM

An interesting article about it. I guess we'll have to wait and see. I'd love it to be able to do engineering problems for me.

Wolfram Alpha is almost more of an engineering accomplishment than a scientific one -- Wolfram has broken down the set of factual questions we might ask, and the computational models and data necessary for answering them, into basic building blocks -- a kind of basic language for knowledge computing if you will. Then, with these building blocks in hand his system is able to compute with them -- to break down questions into the basic building blocks and computations necessary to answer them, and then to actually build up computations and compute the answers on the fly.

Wolfram's team manually entered, and in some cases automatically pulled in, masses of raw factual data about various fields of knowledge, plus models and algorithms for doing computations with the data. By building all of this in a modular fashion on top of the Mathematica engine, they have built a system that is able to actually do computations over vast data sets representing real-world knowledge. More importantly, it enables anyone to easily construct their own computations -- simply by asking questions.

The scientific and philosophical underpinnings of Wolfram Alpha are similar to those of the cellular automata systems he describes in his book, "A New Kind of Science" (NKS). Just as with cellular automata (such as the famous "Game of Life" algorithm that many have seen on screensavers), a set of simple rules and data can be used to generate surprisingly diverse, even lifelike patterns. One of the observations of NKS is that incredibly rich, even unpredictable patterns, can be generated from tiny sets of simple rules and data, when they are applied to their own output over and over again.

This is a system that reflects one perspective -- that of Wolfram and his team -- which probably is a close approximation of the mainstream consensus scientific worldview of our modern civilization. It is a tool -- a tool for answering questions about the world today, based on what we generally agree that we know about it. Still, this is potentially murky philosophical territory, at least for some kinds of questions. Consider global warming -- not all scientists even agree it is taking place, let alone what it signifies or where the trends are headed. Similarly in economics, based on certain assumptions and measurements we are either experiencing only mild inflation right now, or significant inflation. There is not necessarily one right answer -- there are valid alternative perspectives.

I agree with Wolfram, that bias in the data choices will not be a problem, at least for a while. But even scientists don't always agree on the answers to factual questions, or what models to use to describe the world -- and this disagreement is essential to progress in science in fact. If there is only one "right" answer to any question there could never be progress, or even different points of view. Fortunately, Wolfram is desigining his system to link to alternative questions and answers at least, and even to sources for more information about the answers (such as the Wikipeda for example). In this way he can provide unambiguous factual answers, yet also connect to more information and points of view about them at the same time. This is important.

It is ironic that a system like Wolfram Alpha, which is designed to answer questions factually, will probably bring up a broad range of questions that don't themselves have unambiguous factual answers -- questions about philosophy, perspective, and even public policy in the future (if it becomes very widely used). It is a system that has the potential to touch our lives as deeply as Google. Yet how widely it will be used is an open question too.

The system is beautiful, and the user interface is already quite simple and clean. In addition, answers include computationally generated diagrams and graphs -- not just text. It looks really cool. But it is also designed by and for people with IQ's somewhere in the altitude of Wolfram's -- some work will need to be done dumbing it down a few hundred IQ points so as to not overwhelm the average consumer with answers that are so comprehensive that they require a graduate degree to fully understand.


Maybe they could use some sort of bayesian logic to perfect the answers over time.

Edited by Futurist1000, 16 March 2009 - 04:08 AM.


#5 delmet

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Posted 18 March 2009 - 01:08 AM

If this is half what they promise, it is going to be quite something. I don't think it will be able to answer any "factual" question, but just the natural language parsing part sounds better than anything out there. Although it seems like it doesn't compete with google, it would relegate google to medial tasks, and with little work, completely out do google. I am really curious to see how this turns out. I think it has to be quite limited. If it really is as good as it sounds, I would pay a service fee to use it.

#6 JLL

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Posted 18 March 2009 - 08:20 AM

God, I hate it when people try to appear intellectual and say stuff like this:

"It is ironic that a system like Wolfram Alpha, which is designed to answer questions factually, will probably bring up a broad range of questions that don't themselves have unambiguous factual answers -- questions about philosophy, perspective, and even public policy in the future (if it becomes very widely used). It is a system that has the potential to touch our lives as deeply as Google. Yet how widely it will be used is an open question too."

As if philosophy doesn't have unambigous factual answers - the whole point of philosophy is to discover what is true! And "public policy", please. I guess we should exclude all questions about "public policy" from Wolfram Alpha, because there's just no way that trillions of lines of data and rules could ever produce answers as finely-tuned to reality as real-life politicians. When you type in "Is it morally right to tax people?", it should bypass the processing logic and give out a standard answer: "Of course it is, citizen JLL. Your question has been logged."

#7 delmet

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Posted 18 March 2009 - 02:51 PM

God, I hate it when people try to appear intellectual and say stuff like this:

"It is ironic that a system like Wolfram Alpha, which is designed to answer questions factually, will probably bring up a broad range of questions that don't themselves have unambiguous factual answers -- questions about philosophy, perspective, and even public policy in the future (if it becomes very widely used). It is a system that has the potential to touch our lives as deeply as Google. Yet how widely it will be used is an open question too."

As if philosophy doesn't have unambigous factual answers - the whole point of philosophy is to discover what is true! And "public policy", please. I guess we should exclude all questions about "public policy" from Wolfram Alpha, because there's just no way that trillions of lines of data and rules could ever produce answers as finely-tuned to reality as real-life politicians. When you type in "Is it morally right to tax people?", it should bypass the processing logic and give out a standard answer: "Of course it is, citizen JLL. Your question has been logged."


If it could understand a moderately difficult sentence, that would be a break through. Public policy is the last thing that comes to my mind.

#8 Mind

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Posted 07 April 2009 - 08:13 PM

Another interesting article about Wolfram|Alpha

Looking ahead, Wolfram anticipates using an NKS kind of approach for finding new theories. “Rather than just searching for the best algorithms for things like understanding user input, we want to start searching for the best models for a given field. A model is a kind of algorithm for predicting results from existing data. And we’d like to start finding these models on the fly. Once again, the issue is not to emulate humans, but rather to bulldoze a shortest path to an answer.”

For complex reasons having to do with personality issues and academic politics, some scientists are not especially fond of Wolfram and of his NKS. He hopes that Wolfram|Alpha may help to vindicate his worldview.

“People are always asking what NKS is good for. And I think Wolfram|Alpha can be a first example. It’s not as if I’m using all of NKS for it. But think of a historical analogy. Alan Turing developed the notion of a universal computer in the 1930s — and nobody was sure what it was good for. And then, in the 1960s we started seeing word processors — one of the first really big applications for computers. I think Turing might have been surprised that one of the first great uses for his ideas would be something so pedestrian. In an analogous way, Wolfram|Alpha might be the first massively popular application of my ideas. People using it will be using NKS, even though they’re not aware of it.”



#9 Shoe

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Posted 07 April 2009 - 10:12 PM

Another interesting article about Wolfram|Alpha


The article mentions some test results:

Let me give three random examples. If you enter the query, “3/26/2009 + 90 days” you’ll get a page that gives a date ninety days later than the first date. If you enter “mt. everest height length of golden gate” you’ll get a page expressing the height of Mount Everest as a multiple of the length of the Golden Gate Bridge. If you enter “temperature in los gatos,” you’ll get something like the current temperature, a graph of the temperatures over the last week with projections for the next few days, and a graph of the temperatures over the last year.


Perhaps it will actually deliver?

#10 Mind

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Posted 26 April 2009 - 12:49 PM

Sounds hard to believe right?


Perhaps it will actually deliver?


I am hoping it will deliver. A word of caution: "How to over-hype your search engine"

From the demos so far, it seems it will at least find a niche market. I expect many pop-culture writers will diss it because it doesn't answer "who will win the next american idol?" lol.

#11 DJS

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Posted 29 April 2009 - 01:51 AM

I suppose this is almost the definition of hype but...

After Being Upstaged By Google, Wolfram Alpha Fires Back With A Leaked Screenshot

#12 DJS

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Posted 29 April 2009 - 02:23 AM

A solid review:

http://www.semanticu...fram-alpha.html

#13 Mind

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Posted 30 April 2009 - 06:10 PM

Video of the demo

#14 JohnDoe1234

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Posted 01 May 2009 - 10:33 PM

I hate to call it after the fact, but this is pretty much how I foresaw it coming about... Still impressive

#15 Mind

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Posted 01 May 2009 - 11:01 PM

Another review

Let's say you want to know the caloric and nutritional information in a recipe you are making for your family. If you enter "2 cups flour, 2 eggs, 2 cups milk" in Wolfram Alpha, it will give you a nutrition label that reflects the combined values of those foods (after first prompting you to specify which of the several kinds of milk you are using). And if any normalizing of units was required, it will have done it already.


Holy Mackeral! I could sure use that type of info. I have been making some coconut oil treats lately an want to calculate nutritional content, but can't find the time. Maybe Wolfram|Alpha can help me out.

#16 jackinbox

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Posted 02 May 2009 - 02:17 AM

Video of the demo


Watch only if you have a fixation on bald men. I glanced the video and they don't show the product at all.

#17 Guest_Terence Lovejoy_*

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Posted 02 May 2009 - 05:11 AM

They say

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

"launching May 2009".. But it is May 2009.. Hmm..

#18 Mind

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Posted 03 May 2009 - 08:26 PM

This article says later this month, but no definite day of release. With all the hype, no doubt the system will crash or be unavailable.

#19 Mind

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Posted 05 May 2009 - 06:58 PM

Will Wolfram|Alpha make bioinformatics obsolete.

I sure hope so. I would rather creative human minds be working on the science/biology/analysis of gene expression, metabolism, what-not, than entering data and programming computers to handle large amounts of data.

So it's not a stretch for me to imagine a year from now entering this search query:

"List all human genes with significant evidence of positive selection since the human-chimpanzee common ancestor, where either the GO category or OMIM entry includes 'muscle'"

It seems to me that bioinformatics is what generates the output to that query. What you do with the output of that query is evolutionary biology.

So that raises the obvious question. Tomorrow's high-throughput plain-English bioinformatics tool will do the work of ten thousand 2009 graduate students. If a freely-available (or heck, even a paid) service can do the bioinformatics, what should today's graduate students be learning?



#20 Mind

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Posted 05 May 2009 - 07:04 PM

More speculation about how useful Wolfram|Alpha will be and whether it will be transformative.

In order to become transformative for all of society, I think they will have to develop a way of integrating more data from non-wolfram "curators" - similar to how wikipedia allows collaboration.

Curation is also WA’s limitation. If it stays purely curated, without areas in which the Big Anyone can contribute, it won’t be able to grow at Internet speeds. Someone with a good idea — provide info on meds and interactions, or add recipes so ingredients can be mashed up with nutritional and ecological info — will have to suggest it to WolframAlpha, Inc. and hope they take it up. (You could to this sorta kinda through the API, but not get the scaling effects of actually adding data to the system.) And WA will suffer from the perspectival problems inevitable in all curated systems: WA reflects Stephen Wolfram’s interests and perspective. It covers what he thinks is interesting. It covers it from his point of view. It will have to make decisions on topics for which there are no good answers: Is Pluto a planet? Does Scientology go on the list of religions? Does the page on rabbits include nutritional information about rabbit meat? (That, by the way, was Wolfram’s example in my interview of him. If you look at the site from Europe, a “rabbit” query does include the nutritional info, but not if you log in from a US IP address.) But WA doesn’t have to scale up to Internet Supersize to be supersized useful.

So, given those strengths and limitations, how important is WA?

Once people figure out what types of questions it’s good at, I think it will become a standard part of our tools, and for some areas of inquiry, it may be indispensable. I don’t know those areas well enough to give an example that will hold up, but I can imagine WA becoming the first place geneticists go when they have a question about a gene sequence or chemists who want to know about a molecule. I think it is likely to be so useful within particular fields that it becomes the standard place to look first…Like IMDB.com for movies, except for broad, multiple fields, with the ability to cross-compute.

But more broadly, is WA the next Google? Does it transform the Internet?

I don’t think so. Its computational abilities mean it does something not currently done (or not done well enough for a crowd of users), and the aesthetics of its responses make it quite accessible. But how many computational questions do you have a day? If you want to know how many tons of fish France catches, WA will work as an almanac. But that’s not transformational. If you want to know how many tons divided by the average weight of a French person, WA is for you. But the computational uses that are distinctive of WA and for which WA will frequently be an astounding tool are not frequent enough for WA to be transformational on the order of a Google or Wikipedia.

There are at least two other ways it could be transformational, however.

First, its biggest effect may be on metadata. If WA takes off, as I suspect it will, people and organizations will want to get their data into it. But to contribute their data, they will have to put it into WA’s metadata schema. Those schema then become a standard way we organize data. WA could be the killer app of the Semantic Web … the app that gives people both a motive for putting their data into ontologies and a standardized set of ontologies that makes it easy to do so.

Second, a robust computational engine with access to a very wide array of data is a new idea on the Internet. (Ok, nothing is new. But WA is going to bring this idea to mainstream awareness.) That transforms our expectations, just as Wikipedia is important not just because it’s a great encyclopedia but because it proved the power of collaborative crowds. But, WA’s lesson — there’s more that can be computed than we ever imagined — isn’t as counter-intuitive as Wikipedia’s, so it is not as apple-cart-upsetting, so it’s not as transformational. Our cultural reaction to Wikipedia is to be amazed by what we’ve done. With WA, we are likely to be amazed by what Wolfram has done.



#21 DJS

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Posted 14 May 2009 - 06:10 PM

http://www.wolframal...lframalpha.html

#22 Mixter

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Posted 14 May 2009 - 09:32 PM

Will Wolfram|Alpha make bioinformatics obsolete.


Umm, no. Not unless it makes arbitrary microarray experiments comparable or spits out O(log n) versions of assembly and graph algorithms you search for :-P But the semantic stuff in general and that thing in particular hopefully makes computational biology easier.

#23 gregandbeaker

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Posted 14 May 2009 - 10:56 PM

I'm really looking forward to this, transformative or not. What will your first question be?

#24 eternaltraveler

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Posted 15 May 2009 - 02:15 AM

http://www.wolframal...lframalpha.html


so this is the solution to the fermi paradox.

#25 advancedatheist

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Posted 15 May 2009 - 02:28 AM

Okay, somebody had to reference this:

"A Logic Named Joe," by Murray Leinster:

http://www.baen.com/...3499107___2.htm

The story's narrator, who had to disconnect "Joe" for reasons given in the story, even speculates that:

And after all, if I get fed up with bein' old and confined strictly to thinking—why I could hook Joe in long enough to ask: "How can a old guy not stay old?" Joe'll be able to find out. An' he'll tell me.



#26 DJS

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Posted 16 May 2009 - 06:18 PM

Wow. I don't think I've ever seen something hyped this much that was in fact so absolutely useless. It can't even give an answer to "endoplasmic reticulum". I entered in miRNA and it gave the vital stats for a small town in southcentral Slovenia...

They should have made its release date april 1st.

Edited by DJS, 16 May 2009 - 06:18 PM.


#27 lunarsolarpower

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Posted 16 May 2009 - 08:58 PM

It's pretty good at calculating the as-the-crow-flies distance between two points for those who have their own private plane that averages 550 mph. Other than that it's hard to come up with questions it can answer which isn't surprising. For example you can ask it "How fast does hair grow?" but not "How fast does bone grow?" So much of the stuff you could ask it would require an insane database to have the answer. For example "How much freight traveled through my town in 2008?" The fact that you can't give it feedback really seems dumb. For example the results for "19 grams of gold" tells you the market price but doesn't bother to convert it to troy ounces.

#28 DJS

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Posted 16 May 2009 - 11:31 PM

Doesn't recognize the term ubiquitin...

I thought they stuffed a whole bunch of text books and encyclopedias into this thing. At the very least it should be able to regurgitate vocabulary!

#29 eternaltraveler

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Posted 17 May 2009 - 12:30 AM

Wow. I don't think I've ever seen something hyped this much that was in fact so absolutely useless. It can't even give an answer to "endoplasmic reticulum".


i don't know about absolutely useless. It knows the mean airspeed velocity of a unladen swallow

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#30 DJS

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Posted 17 May 2009 - 05:25 AM

Try entering a gene name! Its totally cool.

The best way to understand what it does is to compare search results with google. Of course it's limited at present but its still extraordinary.


Ummm. How is this special?

tp53 #1 and #2 search result on google: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P53 http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/gene=tp53

tp53 on wolframalpha: http://www.wolframal...m/input/?i=tp53

You tell me which one is more comprehensive and easily digestible.

Perhaps I was being naively optimistic. I wanted a tool that allowed me to explore combinations of terms such as "miRNA" and "cancer". Of course, you can already do this with google, but I was hoping for a different approach that produces novel results/relationships.




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