Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming • Hacker News Board

Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming

#31

Post by glymor » Fri, Mar 06, 2009, 4:16 AM UTC

tectonic wrote: post #23

jonmc12 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, Cyc was built off a ridiculously complicated upper ontology using $80M+ over 25 years.

Who uses Cyc?

Apparently various parts of the US security apparatus.

Google Techtalk by Dr. Lenat http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-7704388615049492068

Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming

#32

Post by Avshalom » Fri, Mar 06, 2009, 4:24 AM UTC

DaniFong wrote: post #29

ShabbyDoo wrote: post #18

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?

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.

The important thing being that you can ask it new and novel questions. it sounds in fact something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_ratiocinator as interpreted in The Baroque Cycle

Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming

#33

Post by palish » Fri, Mar 06, 2009, 5:19 AM UTC

So what exactly can be done with a system like this? What types of problems does it solve?

Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming

#34

Post by rudyfink » Fri, Mar 06, 2009, 6:25 AM UTC

I do hope they improve the color scheme and the "computational knowledge search engine" tag line.

Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming

#35

Post by richardw » Fri, Mar 06, 2009, 6:40 AM UTC

palish wrote: post #33

So what exactly can be done with a system like this? What types of problems does it solve?

First, we will ask it what problems it would like to solve.

Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming

#36

Post by madcaptenor » Fri, Mar 06, 2009, 1:42 PM UTC

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.

Actually, I'm not sure if the Wolfram brand name is a reason to pay attention to this, or to deliberately ignore it. It's being described as a cross between Mathematica and A New Kind of Science; the first is wonderful, the second is a new kind of stupid, and I'm not sure which one will win.

Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming

#37

Post by madcaptenor » Fri, Mar 06, 2009, 1:43 PM UTC

Keyframe wrote: post #30

http://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/...

Where's the Feynman letter from?

Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming

#38

Post by asciilifeform » Fri, Mar 06, 2009, 4:50 PM UTC

Obligatory Wolfram primer:

1) http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/

2) http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math/msg/37f51351f5340e58...

Re: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming

#39

Post by run_zeno_run » Sat, Mar 07, 2009, 2:34 AM UTC

So it seems to me that alpha is going to try to create mathematical models from unstructured data found on the web and match them with similar models generated from natural language queries entered by the users. I'm sure probabilistic NLP methods are used extensively and I can see maybe how Mathematica can compute these quickly. But what the bleep is the role of NKS? From what little I know, I can speculate that he might have modeled statistical inference using CAs and so can constrain the probability space of matches?? Jebus I need to know more or forget what I know already, anything in between is frustrating.