Sounds hype-ish, and loose on details... why are they doing this on their own, not publishing it in peer-reviewed journals?
That's just the way the Wolf-man rolls.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science#Methodolo...
Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming
21–30 of 39 posts
Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming
#22Doesn't look like Wolfram|Alpha is even breathing hard.
Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming
#23Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming
#24Sounds like a sequel to the Cyc project, but with more resources being thrown at it
Let's put Wolfram and Lenat together; maybe their ambition will reach critical mass and create some sort of black hole.
Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming
#25I 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.
Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming
#26Sounds like a sequel to the Cyc project, but with more resources being thrown at it
Let's put Wolfram and Lenat together; maybe their ambition will reach critical mass and create some sort of black hole.
Good idea, but not likely. If ambition was a weak attractive force, like gravity, then ego would be a localized, strong repulsive force, like two positive electro-magnetic forces.
Estimating the ego of Wolfram and Lenat, it would take somewhere on the order of 10^9 ambitious geniuses for the net force of ambition to overcome the local force of ego.
Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming
#27Building 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 applicat…
> 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.
Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming
#28Sounds hype-ish, and loose on details... why are they doing this on their own, not publishing it in peer-reviewed journals?
You do realise that industry has tons and tons of research that has never been published. Most academics I know have never searched the patent database, which is only the tip of the iceberg.
Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming
#29I'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?
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.
Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming
#30http://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/...
