Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces
unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com
Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces
1–10 of 35 posts
Re: Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces
#2Summary to looooooooong article.
Author feels that Wolfram should have an alternative direct interface that does not required AI to interpret the meaning/goal of your natural language text query. Kind of like how Grafiti did for the Palm.
Re: Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces
#3Brilliant.
Really. This article expresses perfectly everything that is wrong with Wolfram Alpha (which still can't tell me how much an elephant weighs, no matter how many ways I ask it). There are so many stories of users doing ridiculous things because of such hubristic user interfaces. Hang out with non-hackers long enough and you will clearly see how "they create an incomplete model of the giant electronic brain in their own, non-giant, non-electronic brains."
Also, the phrase "non-solution to a non-problem" is the best thing I've read all week.
Re: Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces
#4Brilliant. Really. This article expresses perfectly everything that is wrong with Wolfram Alpha (which still can't tell me how much an elephant weighs, no matter how many ways I ask it). There are so many stories of users doing ridiculous things because of such hubristic user interfaces. Hang out with non-hackers long enough and you will clearly see how "they create an incomplete model of the giant electronic brain i…
Pretty much agree that it is a brilliant dissection of why WA has the wrong interface for its real market. The people who nominally need its interface don't want it, and it doesn't work very well at that level anyhow. The folks who would use it with a more direct interface are likely to become very frustrated with it.
Casting it as a "false affordance" was well done as well.
Re: Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces
#5Good article (if a bit long). Wolfram Alpha has exactly the kind of interface that you would expect from a company founded by a person that wrote a book called "A New Kind of Science." Stephen Wolfram is a very intelligent person with a world-crushing, fire-breathing ego. This is unfortunate, because a more modest man could create a great tool like Alpha but then assume that he didn't know all of the ways that people would use it, and therefore not require interfacing with it through a broken natural language engine. Wolfram, on the other hand (like many bright people) assumes that only he knows the answers and doesn't bother to think that others might be able to do more with the tool than he could ever think of.
Re: Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces
#6Brilliant. Really. This article expresses perfectly everything that is wrong with Wolfram Alpha (which still can't tell me how much an elephant weighs, no matter how many ways I ask it). There are so many stories of users doing ridiculous things because of such hubristic user interfaces. Hang out with non-hackers long enough and you will clearly see how "they create an incomplete model of the giant electronic brain i…
And it still can't even calculate: http://www07.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+attoparsec+%2F+mill...
Re: Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces
#7Absolutely correct.
I had great expectations when I heard from Wolfram Alpha. The things Mathematica is able to do backed by a giant structured data store seemed mind blowing. As the author said the visualization tools and the (still small) dataset _is_ impressive. I thought: We have all this data, all this visualization options and now we can create aggregate and munch all the facts of the world with an ad-hoc query language. But this simply does not work. There is hardly any functionality to really process data (aside from the predefined ways). And if you come to think about it: One cannot think of a way more complex transformations could be expressed with WA's natural language interface.
For me a better interface would look like this: The basic interface is some kind of full-featured expression language to navigate the data hierarchy (perhaps similar to SQL). You could then build some GUI to interactively navigate/parametrize data/transformations to build more complex expressions. To make the system more easily accessible you could then - and only then - add the natural language recognition system on top of this, which tries to guess some expressions from your input string and gives you some suggestions to start from.
Re: Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces
#8Brilliant. Really. This article expresses perfectly everything that is wrong with Wolfram Alpha (which still can't tell me how much an elephant weighs, no matter how many ways I ask it). There are so many stories of users doing ridiculous things because of such hubristic user interfaces. Hang out with non-hackers long enough and you will clearly see how "they create an incomplete model of the giant electronic brain i…
"non-solution to a non-problem" reminds me of a similar quote by James May on Top Gear, "a brilliant solution to a problem that should never have existed"
Re: Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces
#9I think Wolfram put up their crazy interface in order to avoid just giving away free online Mathematica. Also to allow Stephen's ego to further blossom.
If you could use WA as a Mathematica console BUT with access to great built-in (crawled!) data and visualization tools, then it would be useful.
Re: Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces
#10Very nicely written article.
Aside from the alpha discussion, an additional useful point is the concept of too-intelligent interfaces. This is related to two other observations. One is that for high-throughput data entry (also programming) a nice GUI is really not the thing you want. You want to be able to navigate entirely with the keyboard.
The other is wsywig document processors. Serious documentation (such as that for a fighter aircraft, which when printed out weighs more than the aircraft itself, of for documentation required by the FDA for new drugs) is not really done with wsywig editors, but markup editors of different kinds. If you document is 300,000 pages, you want the pagination to be done in batch.