Wolfram Alpha: The "next" Google?

[RichardLinx]

Better. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/wolfram-alpha-computes-answers-to-factual-questions-this-is-going-to-be-big/


Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain. It provides extremely impressive and thorough answers to a wide range of questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers, it doesn’t merely look them up in a big database.

In this respect it is vastly smarter than (and different from) Google. Google simply retrieves documents based on keyword searches. Google doesn’t understand the question or the answer, and doesn’t compute answers based on models of various fields of human knowledge.

This sounds amazing.

The beta is set to go live in March: http://www.wolframalpha.com/

This is the future of the Internet. Perhaps the beginning of "Web 3.0".

[Kareeser]

Unless it has sentience, it's not really composing answers to poised questions.

It's researching, yes, but it's probably doing the same as google, just formatting it nicely.

You could ask ask.com some questions, and it'd do its best to answer them too...

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I'd get excited if Wolfram alpha could give newbies step-by-step advice on how to install ndiswrapper on cards whose guides are NOT already on the net.

[RichardLinx]

Unless it has sentience, it's not really composing answers to poised questions.

It's researching, yes, but it's probably doing the same as google, just formatting it nicely.

You could ask ask.com some questions, and it'd do its best to answer them too...

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I'd get excited if Wolfram alpha could give newbies step-by-step advice on how to install ndiswrapper on cards whose guides are NOT already on the net.

It may not be AI emulating a human mind but it is impressive. It uses AI to compute it's answers. You could ask it a complex question and it would process the answer.


Wolfram Alpha is a system for computing the answers to questions. To accomplish this it uses built-in models of fields of knowledge, complete with data and algorithms, that represent real-world knowledge.

For example, it contains formal models of much of what we know about science — massive amounts of data about various physical laws and properties, as well as data about the physical world.

Based on this you can ask it scientific questions and it can compute the answers for you. Even if it has not been programmed explicity to answer each question you might ask it.

But science is just one of the domains it knows about — it also knows about technology, geography, weather, cooking, business, travel, people, music, and more.

It is also mentioned that with future developments "it may eventually have the potential to learn and even to make new discoveries."

[PythonPower]

It may not be AI emulating a human mind but it is impressive. It uses AI to compute it's answers. You could ask it a complex question and it would process the answer.

So far this is only speculation though... Unless you have alpha access.

I think it's important to note that most of the opinions so far are not based on using it.

[RichardLinx]

So far this is only speculation though... Unless you have alpha access.

I think it's important to note that most of the opinions so far are not based on using it.

True. I am simply going by what was written in the article. For all I or anyone knows this could just be an extremely over-hyped search engine. I suppose we will see soon enough. It's fun to speculate what it could be capable of though.
If what has been written in the article holds true then this holds endless possibilities.

[cmat]

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you search that."

I'm just wondering the massive amount of computing power needed to execute this sort of thing. Every request made will need to be processed and this would be much more taxing on hardware than Google's indexing and retrieval. In itself is quite complex.

[JackieChan]

Seems interesting! :)

[artilec]

an article written in 1997 on superinteligence

http://holtz.org/Library/Social%20Science/Futurology/SuperIntelligence%20by%20Bostrom%201997.htm

[kevdog]

ArsTechnica seems to have a different perspective on the significance of this future project:

http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2009/03/stephen-wolfram-and-the-techno-dianetics-of-google-ology.ars

The one thing about this article that I agree with is that this Wolfram project is committing the same atrocity as Wikipedia. It cites no reference or source for its answers. Although its been awhile since I was in college, I still believe its standard practice to list references and sources within papers to validate points. I know many have faked these references or use rather unreliable sources, however that is another discussion. To provide an answer to a question claiming it to be "FACT" is just heresy unless you can provide at least some source or explanation for your conclusion. Isn't this actually what Intelligence and Learning actually constitutes?

[billgoldberg]

Why wasn't that around when I was in high-school?

You can just ask it a question and it'll give the answer?

I don't know if that's such a good things.

But we'll see how well it works.

[Sporkman]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_base

[Faolan84]

For some reason this reminds me of that story by Issac Asimov called "The Last Question" :P

[sambita]

For some reason this reminds me of that story by Issac Asimov called "The Last Question" :P

I was going to post the exact same thing!

[RichardLinx]

Another article related to Wolfram Alpha has been posted on a ZDNet: http://education.zdnet.com/?p=2231

[oedipuss]

Potentially brilliant, yes, but a google killer ?

They would be too different. Sometimes you do want the predictability of a simple keyword search, after all.

[joey-elijah]

Potentially brilliant, yes, but a google killer ?

They would be too different. Sometimes you do want the predictability of a simple keyword search, after all.

I was gonna say the same thing. If i'm searching for something that doesn't require an 'answer' per se this would get a bit... in the way.

I wouldn't be surprised if (read: i hope) google bought them out. That'd be a smart move, but seriously Google have tons of cash and tons of developers. They're number one search engine because they're the best, people often forget that. I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't already working on future search methods etc. There was lots of talk about the semantic web search a while back, then social search and now this. Sure it'll be awesome if it works but given the company is relatively small i'd hate for them to get clogged up with 'sponsored' results etc in order to pay the bills.

[handy]

In 1999, Terrence McKenna (http://www.sacredmysteries.com/public/department54.cfm) was filmed giving what turned out to be his last public talk (as he was soon after diagnosed with a terminal illness), the film is titled:

Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-335621086425739066)

It is really worth watching, if nothing else Terrence was incredibly thought provoking, his skills of synthesis using great knowledge from so many diverse fields is a joy to behold. imho

The only unfortunate thing in the movie is the distracting background graphics.