Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming

blog.wolfram.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 39 posts

Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming

#11

Post by programnature »

dschobel wrote: post #5

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.

There is no mention of "learning algorithms" or stuff of that nature in the post. Its a different approach:

"But if one’s already made knowledge computable, one doesn’t need to do that kind of natural language understanding. All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do."

The nlp involved is quite different from the mainstream direction.

Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming

#12

Post by jerf »

dschobel wrote: post #5

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.

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.

Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming

#16

Post by cchooper »

dschobel wrote: post #5

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.

It sounds to me like an expert system. What I can't see is how it's different to any other kind of expert system. Just more data?

Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming

#18

Post by 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?

Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming

#19

Post by evgen »

petejackson wrote: post #15

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

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.
Post reply on HN