Editor’s note: Below is a guest post from Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, about a new computational knowledge engine called Wolfram Alpha being developed by computer scientist Stephen Wolfram. Spivack originally published it on Twine, and it is republished here with his permission. Some of the sections have been rearranged for clarity.
Stephen Wolfram is building something new — and it is really impressive and significant. In fact it may be as important for the Web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.
Stephen was kind enough to spend two hours with me last week to demo his new online service — Wolfram Alpha (scheduled to open in May). In the course of our conversation we took a close look at Wolfram Alpha’s capabilities, discussed where it might go, and what it means for the Web, and even the Semantic Web.
Stephen has not released many details of his project publicly yet, so I will respect that and not give a visual description of exactly what I saw. However, he has revealed it a bit in a recent article, and so below I will give my reactions to what I saw and what I think it means. And from that you should be able to get at least some idea of the power of this new system.
A Computational Knowledge Engine for the Web
In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a “computational knowledge engine” for the Web. OK, so what does that really mean? Basically it means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you.
It doesn’t simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google does, and it isn’t just a giant database of knowledge, like the Wikipedia. It doesn’t simply parse natural language and then use that to retrieve documents, like Powerset, for example. Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions — like questions that have factual answers such as “What country is Timbuktu in?” or “How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?” or “What is the average rainfall in Seattle?”
Think about that for a minute. It computes the answers. Wolfram Alpha doesn’t simply contain huge amounts of manually entered pairs of questions and answers, nor does it search for answers in a database of facts. Instead, it understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions.
How Does it Work?
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 also has a natural language interface for asking it questions. This interface allows you to ask questions in plain language, or even in various forms of abbreviated notation, and then provides detailed answers.
The vision seems to be to create a system wich can do for formal knowledge (all the formally definable systems, heuristics, algorithms, rules, methods, theorems, and facts in the world) what search engines have done for informal knowledge (all the text and documents in various forms of media).
Building Blocks for Knowledge Computing
Wolfram Alpha is almost more of an engineering accomplishment than a scientific one — Wolfram has broken down the set of factual questions we might ask, and the computational models and data necessary for answering them, into basic building blocks — a kind of basic language for knowledge computing if you will. Then, with these building blocks in hand his system is able to compute with them — to break down questions into the basic building blocks and computations necessary to answer them, and then to actually build up computations and compute the answers on the fly.
Wolfram’s team manually entered, and in some cases automatically pulled in, masses of raw factual data about various fields of knowledge, plus models and algorithms for doing computations with the data. By building all of this in a modular fashion on top of the Mathematica engine, they have built a system that is able to actually do computations over vast data sets representing real-world knowledge. More importantly, it enables anyone to easily construct their own computations — simply by asking questions.
The scientific and philosophical underpinnings of Wolfram Alpha are similar to those of the cellular automata systems he describes in his book, “A New Kind of Science” (NKS). Just as with cellular automata (such as the famous “Game of Life” algorithm that many have seen on screensavers), a set of simple rules and data can be used to generate surprisingly diverse, even lifelike patterns. One of the observations of NKS is that incredibly rich, even unpredictable patterns, can be generated from tiny sets of simple rules and data, when they are applied to their own output over and over again.
In fact, cellular automata, by using just a few simple repetitive rules, can compute anything any computer or computer program can compute, in theory at least. But actually using such systems to build real computers or useful programs (such as Web browsers) has never been practical because they are so low-level it would not be efficient (it would be like trying to build a giant computer, starting from the atomic level).
The simplicity and elegance of cellular automata proves that anything that may be computed — and potentially anything that may exist in nature — can be generated from very simple building blocks and rules that interact locally with one another. There is no top-down control, there is no overarching model. Instead, from a bunch of low-level parts that interact only with other nearby parts, complex global behaviors emerge that, for example, can simulate physical systems such as fluid flow, optics, population dynamics in nature, voting behaviors, and perhaps even the very nature of space-time. This is the main point of the NKS book in fact, and Wolfram draws numerous examples from nature and cellular automata to make his case.
But with all its focus on recombining simple bits of information and simple rules, cellular automata is not a reductionist approach to science — in fact, it is much more focused on synthesizing complex emergent behaviors from simple elements than in reducing complexity back to simple units. The highly synthetic philosophy behind NKS is the paradigm shift at the basis of Wolfram Alpha’s approach too. It is a system that is very much “bottom-up” in orientation.
Wolfram has created a set of building blocks for working with formal knowledge to generate useful computations, and in turn, by putting these computations together you can answer even more sophisticated questions and so on. It’s a system for synthesizing sophisticated computations from simple computations. Of course anyone who understands computer programming will recognize this as the very essence of good software design. But the key is that instead of forcing users to write programs to do this in Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha enables them to simply ask questions in natural language questions and then automatically assembles the programs to compute the answers they need.
This is not to say that Wolfram Alpha IS a cellular automata itself — but rather that it is similarly based on fundamental rules and data that are recombined to form highly sophisticated structures. The knowledge and intelligence it contains are extremely modularized and can be used to synthesize answers to factual questions nobody has asked yet. The questions are broken down to their basic parts and then simple reasoning takes places, and answers are computed on the vast knowledge base in the system. It appears the system can make inferences and do some basic reasoning across what it knows — it is not purely reductionist in that respect; it is generative, it can synthesize new knowledge, if asked to.
Wolfram Alpha perhaps represents what may be a new approach to creating an “intelligent machine” that does away with much of the manual labor of explicitly building top-down expert systems about fields of knowledge (the traditional AI approach, such as that taken by the Cyc project), while simultaneously avoiding the complexities of trying to do anything reasonable with the messy distributed knowledge on the Web (the open-standards Semantic Web approach). It’s simpler than top down AI and easier than the original vision of Semantic Web.
Generally if someone had proposed doing this to me, I would have said it was not practical. But Wolfram seems to have figured out a way to do it. The proof is that he’s done it. It works. I’ve seen it myself.
The Hairy Questions
Of course, questions abound. It remains to be seen just how smart Wolfram Alpha really is, or can be. How easily extensible is it? Will it get increasingly hard to add and maintain knowledge as more is added to it? Will it ever make mistakes? What forms of knowledge will it be able to handle in the future?
I think Wolfram would agree that it is probably never going to be able to give relationship or career advice, for example, because that is “fuzzy” — there is often no single right answer to such questions. And I don’t know how comprehensive it is, or how it will be able to keep up with all the new knowledge in the world (the knowledge in the system is exclusively added by Wolfram’s team right now, which is a labor intensive process). But Wolfram is an ambitious guy. He seems confident that he has figured out how to add new knowledge to the system at a fairly rapid pace, and he seems to be planning to make the system extremely broad.
And there is the question of bias, which we addressed as well. Is there any risk of bias in the answers the system gives because all the knowledge is entered by Wolfram’s team? Those who enter the knowledge and design the formal models in the system are in a position to both define the way the system thinks — both the questions and the answers it can handle. Wolfram believes that by focusing on factual knowledge — things like you might find in the Wikipedia or textbooks or reports — the bias problem can be avoided. At least he is focusing the system on questions that do have only one answer — not questions for which there might be many different opinions. Everyone generally agrees for example that the closing price of GOOG on a certain data is a particular dollar amount. It is not debatable. These are the kinds of questions the system addresses.
But even for some supposedly factual questions, there are potential biases in the answers one might come up with, depending on the data sources and paradigms used to compute them. Thus the choice of data sources has to be made carefully to try to reflect as non-biased a view as possible. Wolfram’s strategy is to rely on widely accepted data sources like well-known scientific models, public data about factual things like the weather, geography and the stock market published by reputable organizatoins and government agencies, etc. But of course even this is a particular worldview and reflects certain implicit or explicit assumptions about what data sources are authoritative.
This is a system that reflects one perspective — that of Wolfram and his team — which probably is a close approximation of the mainstream consensus scientific worldview of our modern civilization. It is a tool — a tool for answering questions about the world today, based on what we generally agree that we know about it. Still, this is potentially murky philosophical territory, at least for some kinds of questions. Consider global warming — not all scientists even agree it is taking place, let alone what it signifies or where the trends are headed. Similarly in economics, based on certain assumptions and measurements we are either experiencing only mild inflation right now, or significant inflation. There is not necessarily one right answer — there are valid alternative perspectives.
I agree with Wolfram, that bias in the data choices will not be a problem, at least for a while. But even scientists don’t always agree on the answers to factual questions, or what models to use to describe the world — and this disagreement is essential to progress in science in fact. If there is only one “right” answer to any question there could never be progress, or even different points of view. Fortunately, Wolfram is desigining his system to link to alternative questions and answers at least, and even to sources for more information about the answers (such as the Wikipeda for example). In this way he can provide unambiguous factual answers, yet also connect to more information and points of view about them at the same time. This is important.
It is ironic that a system like Wolfram Alpha, which is designed to answer questions factually, will probably bring up a broad range of questions that don’t themselves have unambiguous factual answers — questions about philosophy, perspective, and even public policy in the future (if it becomes very widely used). It is a system that has the potential to touch our lives as deeply as Google. Yet how widely it will be used is an open question too.
The system is beautiful, and the user interface is already quite simple and clean. In addition, answers include computationally generated diagrams and graphs — not just text. It looks really cool. But it is also designed by and for people with IQ’s somewhere in the altitude of Wolfram’s — some work will need to be done dumbing it down a few hundred IQ points so as to not overwhelm the average consumer with answers that are so comprehensive that they require a graduate degree to fully understand.
It also remains to be seen how much the average consumer thirsts for answers to factual questions. I do think all consumers at times have a need for this kind of intelligence once in a while, but perhaps not as often as they need something like Google. But I am sure that academics, researchers, students, government employees, journalists and a broad range of professionals in all fields definitely need a tool like this and will use it every day.
How Smart is it and Will it Take Over the World?
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.
But as intelligent as it seems, Wolfram Alpha is not HAL 9000, and it wasn’t intended to be. It doesn’t have a sense of self or opinions or feelings. It’s not artificial intelligence in the sense of being a simulation of a human mind. Instead, it is a system that has been engineered to provide really rich knowledge about human knowledge — it’s a very powerful calculator that doesn’t just work for math problems — it works for many other kinds of questions that have unambiguous (computable) answers.
There is no risk of Wolfram Alpha becoming too smart, or taking over the world. It’s good at answering factual questions; it’s a computing machine, a tool — not a mind.
One of the most surprising aspects of this project is that Wolfram has been able to keep it secret for so long. I say this because it is a monumental effort (and achievement) and almost absurdly ambitious. The project involves more than a hundred people working in stealth to create a vast system of reusable, computable knowledge, from terabytes of raw data, statistics, algorithms, data feeds, and expertise. But he appears to have done it, and kept it quiet for a long time while it was being developed.
Relationship to the Semantic Web
During our discussion, after I tried and failed to poke holes in his natural language parser for a while, we turned to the question of just what this thing is, and how it relates to other approaches like the Semantic Web.
The first question was could (or even should) Wolfram Alpha be built using the Semantic Web in some manner, rather than (or as well as) the Mathematica engine it is currently built on. Is anything missed by not building it with Semantic Web’s languages (RDF, OWL, Sparql, etc.)?
The answer is that there is no reason that one MUST use the Semantic Web stack to build something like Wolfram Alpha. In fact, in my opinion it would be far too difficult to try to explicitly represent everything Wolfram Alpha knows and can compute using OWL ontologies. It is too wide a range of human knowledge and giant OWL ontologies are just too difficult to build and curate.
It would of course at some point be beneficial to integrate with the Semantic Web so that the knowledge in Wolfram Alpha could be accessed, linked with, and reasoned with, by other semantic applications on the Web, and perhaps to make it easier to pull knowledge in from outside as well. In this area, the standards of the Semantic Web could be quite useful to the project. However for the internal knowledge representation and reasoning that takes places in the system, it appears Wolfram has found a pragmatic and efficient representation of his own, and I don’t think he needs the Semantic Web at that level. It seems to be doing just fine without it.
Wolfram Alpha is built on hand-curated knowledge and expertise. Wolfram and his team have somehow figured out a way to make that practical where all others who have tried this have failed to achieve their goals. The task is gargantuan — there is just so much diverse knowledge in the world. Representing even a small segment of it formally turns out to be extremely difficult and time-consuming.
It has generally not been considered feasible for any one group to hand-curate all knowledge about every subject. This is why the Semantic Web was invented — by enabling everyone to curate their own knowledge about their own documents and topics in parallel, in principle at least, more knowledge could be represented and shared in less time by more people — in an interoperable manner. At least that is the vision of the Semantic Web.
But doing anything as sophisticated as Wolfram Alpha on existing decentralized Semantic Web data would simply not be practical today, if ever. I think Wolfram’s approach is more pragmatic. The centralized hand-curation of Wolfram Alpha is simply more manageable and efficient for a project of this scale and complexity. It’s also a potential bottleneck and most certainly a cost-center. But it appears to be a tradeoff that Wolfram can afford to make, and one worth making as well.
Competition
Where Google is a system for FINDING things that we as a civilization collectively publish, Wolfram Alpha is for ANSWERING questions about what we as a civilization collectively know. It’s the next step in the distribution of knowledge and intelligence around the world — a new leap in the intelligence of our collective “Global Brain.” And like any big next-step, Wolfram Alpha works in a new way — it computes answers instead of just looking them up.
Wolfram Alpha, at its heart is quite different from a brute force statistical search engine like Google. And it is not going to replace Google — it is not a general search engine: You would probably not use Wolfram Alpha to shop for a new car, find blog posts about a topic, or to choose a resort for your honeymoon. It is not a system that will understand the nuances of what you consider to be the perfect romantic getaway, for example — there is still no substitute for manual human-guided search for that. Where it appears to excel is when you want facts about something, or when you need to compute a factual answer to some set of questions about factual data.
I think the folks at Google will be surprised by Wolfram Alpha, and they will probably want to own it, but not because it risks cutting into their core search engine traffic. Instead, it will be because it opens up an entirely new field of potential traffic around questions, answers and computations that you can’t do on Google today.
The services that are probably going to be most threatened by a service like Wolfram Alpha are the Wikipedia, Metaweb’s Freebase, and any natural language search engines (such as Microsoft’s upcoming search engine, based perhaps in part on Powerset’s technology among others), and other services that are trying to build comprehensive factual knowledge bases.
As a side-note my own service, Twine.com, is NOT trying to do what Wolfram Alpha is trying to do, fortunately. Instead, Twine uses the Semantic Web to help people filter the Web, organize knowledge, and track their interests. It’s a very different goal. And I’m glad, because I would not want to be competing with Wolfram Alpha. It’s a force to be reckoned with.
Future Steps
I think there is more potential to this system than Stephen has revealed so far. I think he has bigger ambitions for it in the long-term future. I believe it has the potential to be THE online service for computing factual answers. THE system for factual knowlege on the Web. More than that, it may eventually have the potential to learn and even to make new discoveries. We’ll have to wait and see where Wolfram takes it.
Maybe Wolfram Alpha could even do a better job of retrieving documents than Google, for certain kinds of questions — by first understanding what you really want, then computing the answer, and then giving you links to documents that related to the answer. But even if it is never applied to document retrieval, I think it has the potential to play a leading role in all our daily lives — it could function like a kind of expert assistant, with all the facts and computational power in the world at our fingertips.
I would expect that Wolfram Alpha will open up various API’s in the future and then we’ll begin to see some interesting new, intelligent, applications begin to emerge based on its underlying capabilities and what it knows already.
In May, Wolfram plans to open up what I believe will be a first version of Wolfram Alpha. Anyone interested in a smarter Web will find it quite interesting, I think. Meanwhile, I look forward to learning more about this project as Stephen reveals more in months to come.
One thing is certain, Wolfram Alpha is quite impressive and Stephen Wolfram deserves all the congratulations he is soon going to get.
This sounds very similar to the multitude of AI bots that already exist, which are able to answer basic questions and retrieve information. It will be interesting to see to what extent their natural language processor actually works.
What would be incredible is if they are actually able to make the system improve itself with each query, effectively making it an online, AI-based search engine using the internet as it’s brain. Actually, that sounds kind of scary now that I think about it..
Hype machine.
Haha… Hype machine!
This reminds me of Steorn Orbo.
http://www.steo....com/orbo/what/
Probably, I will ask “How Steorn Orbo works?” to Wolfram Alpha when it comes out.
Sweet! Another Ask Jeeves!
I’ll believe it when it can answer basic chemistry questions like “What’s the reaction product for bromine plus phenol?”
Anyone with basic organic chemistry knowledge knows the answer. The answer is a fact. Yes, there are molecular modeling programs that can guess at the experimental results. But even though these programs have been development for decades, they still may take days and days to compute providing suspect answers that never totally agree with experiment.
I guess what I’m saying is that W|A will probably excel at converting *C to *F, giving synonyms to the word “sesquipedalian”, and telling you what the weather may be like on your birthday – BUT will totally fail for hard science.
PS: I’m an organic chemist if that was not totally obvious.
Bromine plus phenol in what pH?
reaction product = 2,4,6-tribromophenol, right?
Results via Google:
http://www.chem...henol/ring.html
http://dictiona.../tribromophenol
Results via Wolfram Alpha:
just a chemical comparison…
We’re just not there yet
Go, Wolfram, Go!
Interesting legal implications … Wolfram Alpha will inevitably be marketed as a provider of answers to people who place a high value on them – but what happens when/if they’re wrong? There’s an incredible amount of fiction (intentional and unintentional) on the internet – how will Wolfram Alpha make the distinction? It could become a bit of a sport trying to create fictitious information purely to influence wrong Wolfram answers. Satnavs have caused serious problems by sending drivers down impassable roads, remember … not trying to be negative, this really is science fiction turning into fact right in front of our eyes, but it’s going to be fascinating watching its baby steps in two months’ time.
Such an obvious one..!
I shall be asking Wolfram “What is the meaning of life?”, “Are we alone?” & “Does god exist?”
does ‘god’ exist? that’s an easy one: no.
This is the first post in a very long time that has given me chills. Sustained chills. Congratulations to the Wolfram team. This seems more game changing than the evolution of search as we see it today.
I feel the same way. If this is even half as amazing as the author claims, then we have found the next-big-thing. I will use this every 7 minutes.
Not search. Answers.
It does not displace search.
I hope there is an API to allow thousands of developers to enhance the rules engine. A team of a few hundred can’t possibly tackle tens of thousands of subjects.
This gave you “sustained chills?”
Jeez, you are in serious need of some human companionship.
i got chills too. and i have lots of human companionship. more than you can imagine.
Gay men don’t count just ask Wolfram!
So what’s stopping it from indexing a site like http://f2bb.com and returning all types of off the wall crap?
Big article, full of cool keywords, to explain that a software is capable to understand the question “What is the average rainfall in Seattle this month?” and look up the answer in a database?
give me a break, techcrunch
You obviously didn’t read it.
Well, so tell me how you compute ““What country is Timbuktu in?”” with 1D cellular automata?
Factual data come from databases.
WA will not answer the questions “How long does a turtle live” or “What is the power consumption of my fridge” with (FTA) 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.
Yeah man, they obviously should have asked you first.
I don’t know what 1D cellular automata have to do with it, but I’m hoping that the article just chose poor examples. I could imagine something like, for the average rainfall question, if the system had available data about cloud observations and temperatures, and algorithms about how those things relate to an area’s average rainfall, it could figure out how to calculate the answer even if the creators hadn’t considered that exact question. Ids that the same as other systems out there? Maybe, I don’t know, but it’s different than a database lookup.
Good point. Anyone who has read wolfram’s book already knows that his “new science” is just the same old crap restated differently. Nothing of note to be found in wolfram anything.
Wall of text full of a bunch of BS hype. Let me know when it comes out and actually works. Right now it’s just another cuil.
…written by the founder of another Cuil, that goes by the name of Twine? I look forward to trying out Wolfram’s latest creation, but I’m skeptical until I see it. When something is hyped up this much without giving specific examples of it working, I’m going to be pretty wary too.
I’ve seen it, it’s real, and it’s impressive (although as Wolfram says, it will be a continual work in progress) . Think TrueKnowledge meets Mathematica.
Could you provide some specific examples that you found impressive?
Thanks Guest Author – I haven’t laughed so much in a long time.
Incidently, on a related matter, I have a friction-less Stirling Engine soon to be on the market, and it has over a 99% efficiency.
It could possibly change the world as we know it.
TC editors, can I get my friend to review it and perhaps provide a description please? I can’t let them actually measure or use it, nor step too close to my velvet curtain, but please let me assure you this is no snake-oil.
I think my JoeEngine is a new paradigm for powering the web via actual bullshit rather than any other kind of animal’s shit.
Exciting stuff eh?!
This is a New Kind of Search Engine! I am a GENIUS!
Good to see you, say, I want you to give me back the $55 I gave you back in 2003 for that terrible book
You mean the new kind of search engine that you talk about in this book.
How many times did I read that construct in his book? Every 3rd paragraph.
“… about the new kind of science that I talk about in this book.”
Dude’s smart, I guess, but he needed a ghostwriter.
TrueKnowledge has been doing this for a while now… And they do it well. It’s certainly interesting, but did it change the world? No.
TrueKnowledge is still in beta, and they’ve certainly been rapidly improving their product.
I had a bit of a discussion on the original Twine page (and over Twitter) with the Nova about the differences. He says that WolframAlpha will be much more computational than TrueKnowledge, but I’m not sure I completely understand how. I look forward to seeing WolframAlpha when it’s out.
As for changing the world, I agree that the value is tough to nail down. I see it mainly in helping to structure and connect various unstructured data on the web. But we’ll see…
I saw your exchange on the Twine page, but as you say, it’s hard to understand what will make WolframAlpha so much better. And even if it is better, so what? I don’t really see myself changing my search habits to go to WA to find out the answer to a ‘computational question’ – Google does that just fine.
In any case, appreciate the well-considered response. Often a rarity amongst the comments on TC nowadays.
Exactly. There’s a question of how the two different companies will approach the problem, and there’s a separate question as to if it’s really needed. I think we’ll find out the answer to the former long before the latter.
And thanks for the compliment.
I’m the founder of True Knowledge and Stephen Wolfram was good enough to give me an extended demo of Wolfram Alpha over the weekend.
I’d agree that we are possibly the closest comparable in that we are also building a platform that unifies and stores structured knowledge and enables this knowledge to be accessible through question answering. We also heavily use inference to “compute” answers.
Having said that, there are also considerable differences: Wolfram’s broad approach is bringing together and curating all the knowledge themselves and generating a full page response to queries using millions of lines of Mathematica code.
Our approach in contrast is to enable users to build the knowledge base and to produce concise answers created by inference steps that usually involve no domain specific coding at all.
There are advantages and disadvantages of both these approaches and these will also heavily affect the likely uses the systems will be put to. However, it was very exciting to see WA and I’m looking forward to the launch.
what I don’t get about you guys… you try to tell us that you COMPUTE an answer.. when the answer is a look up in the database…
We’re all in IT we know databases.. so why do you keep telling us that a database look up needs to be computed?
noobs said…
We’re all in IT we know databases..
You’re in IT. Dr Wolfram is a scientist not an IT, but just happen to be entrepreneur in IT. Can you make a differentiation of these two? Bill Gates is in IT. Brin & Page are in IT, but hey, they’re not in the same par as scientists John von Neumann, Richard Feynman and the likes. Dr Wolfram’s credentials is closer to those scientists than Bill Gates, Brin & Page, etc…
@noobss: a huge class of queries can’t be effectively answered with just a lookup. To take a very simple example think about a persons age, this constantly changes so it makes sense to store dates of birth and then compute (or infer) ages from that.
Google:
What country is Timbuktu in? – first result: Mali
How many protons are in a hydrogen atom? – “Protons: 1″
What is the average rainfall in Seattle? – first result: 37.1 inches
All of the questions they gave an example to are answered without clicking a single result on Google..
Yep. Try the same on TrueKnowledge and get “Error” messages.
q: who runs USA? Google knows (lol)
q: what is the average salary of java programmers in NYC? Google knows. TK chokes.
I want some of what you are smoking…
Gosh… I have a background in much of the stuff you are talking about. And while the AI bla bla always sounds great and provides that secret sauce, at the end of the day those systems all fall flat… they do great in small areas. But for an engine as you described… no way.
Oh and it is the next greatest thing after google, but I can’t tell you too much about it, and you cant write too much…
Let me phrase it in one sentence, either PUT UP or SHUT UP. There’s a new google slayer search engine on the block every 3 weeks… and then we all go back to using google…
Anyone heard of cuil lately? And please T$ write some quality articles… not that garbage..
You spelt knobs wrong.
I think there’s a lot of promise here and it’s definitely an advancement over the current answers that search engines can give.
@ Jonas: I don’t think this engine simply stores massive amount of data and does a lookup based on the input query. From what I can tell, it can actually compute answers even if someone has never asked the question. For example, “average rainfall in Seattle” is easy because that info is on thousands of indexed pages but what about “what is the average rainfall in Seattle when the Mariners have played a game at home” which would make Alpha go and find out what dates the Mariners played home games and then pull rainfall data and then calculate the number.
oh and one more thing.. the more someone talks (or writes) about something so vaguely… my bullshit meter just hits the gong after 300 words… So Nova (what name is that anyway) get a grip…. and start being objective and mattering…
Wow, you write like a 12 year old. Why don`t you grow up and reread the article. First, it is not a search engine, nor does it claim to be a `google-killer`. It has been stated over and over that it serves a distinctly different purpose than google. As to them needing to `put-up or shut-up`, the site launches in may, so I think that covers that.
Moreover, for anyone who has studied science or math at a high level, having a simple quick way to recall factual information such as theories you haven`t used for three years or physical laws that you have forgotten and can`t think of a good keyword to give google to get the answer, this sounds like a godsend. At least as much so as google calculator has become. This could be incredibly useful.
And as far as mattering, I must have missed your article…
dude.. let me be clear…. I do know my stuff and I do know a lot about things you talk… and that’s why I know that you are full of it. There are so many inconsistencies.. where anyone vaguely familiar with the stuff the author talks about just wants to throw up.
Just a very very simple example… you keep talking about answers that have to be computed.. and then you want to tell us that rainfall in Seattle… needs to be computed, when all it is is a simple look up in the database… so what’s there to compute.. we all know our IT here, so your bs just does not work here.
At the end of the day you can keep trying to put a donkey into a horse stable all you want, at the end it still remains a donkey!!
Noobs said…
you want to tell us that rainfall in Seattle… needs to be computed, when all it is is a simple look up in the database… so what’s there to compute..
Man, I can’t believe your insistent on database look up. Do you know how fuzzy inference system work? It computes on the fly with every new inputs, ie, number-crunching. There is no look-up at all. The rule membership functions can be read-in from a repository (as a text-file) into the working memory and not necessary a database.
Who knows what WA can come up with, just wait and see and stop that layman put down of WA.
I believe that WA will be a combination of numeric computations & symbolic computations knowledge-driven retrieval.
Hi, Stevie-boy! Hope you’re having a good day!
You know, the Romans had it right – you SO need a slave whispering into your ear. Because they were right – you really are only a man.
it’s domain is too long.it’s terrible!
i ‘d rather not type into 12 letters befor
enter it. it’s not convenient!!!!!
wolfram alpha
why not combine the two words
in pronounce the F is the smae as “ph”
maybe “wolpha”will be OK
WOLPHA http://www.wolpha.com
what about is?
wolpha.com is an illegal mirror site in China, not Wolfram Alpha itself.
This looks great. Another similar technology has been demonstrated by the Autonomy Co. (Autonomy.com). The new directions of AI where we enlist statistical processes over large databases is certainly impressive. It goes contrary to our instincts as scientists to perform logical and precise reasoning.
Pedro
This could be as Cuil as Powerset! It’s making me feel Dipsie already! Not sure he’ll be able to flip it for $100M in this market though.
http://www.pcwo...f_the_gate.html
http://www.guar...s/2007/mar/27/8
http://www.sili...university.html
Guest author… I call Bullshit…
Have rarely read so much garbage… there’s a new search engine on the corner every 3 weeks then we all go back to Google…
And what the f.. where’s the objectivity, critical questions… this guest author dude has been had with fancy words of processing and AI… and that he obviously has no clue is quite clear….
Nova (what name is that anyway) please research your stuff, get a basic Computer Science Background and please start mattering so you don’t wast our time with garbage like that.
And whenever an article is using more then 300 words my bullshit meter hits the gong…..
Perhaps a life plagued with perceived inadequacies has doomed you to condescending others.
Or, as a wise Simpsons character once said, “Some people are just…jerks.”
The idiots whining about how terrible the product is before it even sees the light of day are just another depressing example of nerd rage. If this were Digg, we could bury them. Alas.
this news gives me sexual stimulation … don’t know why =/
check out this douche’s wikipedia page
http://en.wikip...ki/Nova_Spivack
What did he actually accomplish? paying to get a jet flight for some zero gravity loops.. is that an accomplishement…
Or all that AI talk.. I do have a good AI background… the real AI people just do stuff and deliver, not just talk..
And now the next cool word.. semantic web… yeahhh.. right.. that one has been dead for over a decade…
This almost seams too ambitious to be true, but then again, we are speaking of Wolfram. If anyone on earth can do it, he can.
Interesting the part about stealth. Wolfram locked himself in for years writing NKS.
I got chills reading this article too.
If its actually workable in practice, then its a game changer. I could see a lot of knowledge searches being conducted using that tool.
Opening up the API would be something else too. For all you skeptics, at least keep an open mind. This is not just another cuil.
Wolfram Alpha = SkyNet
Wolfram Alpha + Intel Programmable Matter = Terminator
This might be the most inovative tool created in the last 10 years. It can change the way we learn and teach. As a teacher (portuguese) I am enthusiastic about this tool.
I’d like to see how this service responds to blues artists that are constantly wondering where their baby has done gone.
This could be a game changer for those that have been done wrong, are dazed and confused, or just plain treated like a dog.
You are made of awesome!
How to build Grey Goo?
Sounds very good I wonder how they do with very vague questions. Someone should try to find out how does it do with sentences that have more than one independent clause I bet it would f**k up in a minute.
They need a new domain, Wolfram there wasn’t anything else they could come up with. If they do make it big I definitely hope that they get a domain thats easier to type, pronounce and spell
and rename the search that and they can keep Wolfram as the parent company; heck you can buy a better name off eBay for like 5 dollars.
“Someone should try to find out how does it do with sentences that have more than one independent clause I bet it would f**k up in a minute.”
Exactly. Even for me, a human being (the ultimate adaptive interpretation processor), some multi-level questions are just too problematic to interpret.
I do see, however, the huge possibilities this system can offer, if only they’d drop the interpretative aspect and offer a syntax form to insert parameters instead. In this way I do not have to worry about the reliability of their interpretation of my question and still would get the answers that I want.
Some things just aren’t meant for IQ <= 100.
Dr. Wolfram has come up with revolutionary ideas over the last 2 decades in Physics, Mathematics and Computing. Any inquiring minds out there should read his book, “A new kind of science“.
Besides being a good author, Dr. Wolfram’s CAS (computer algebra system) product, Mathematica produced by his company is the best tool of its kind there for doing symbolic computational science. It is also a useful tool for software developers who develop/proto-type numerical algorithms, because it is fast and more productive than using a high-level language such as C, C++,C#, Fortran, Java, for proto-typing. The final algorithm can be coded in a high-level language, but proto-typing is the most time-consuming stage of developing numerical algorithms because of their complexities. Throw in Matlab there with Mathematica as numerical algorithm proto-typing tools and a developer can’t be more satisfied than using these two.
Voice recognition/syntetization=WA API=WA and we have personal assistent. Nice
And if it can answer questions, then why not answer commands? Sequences of demands? James, please go to betgraphs.com and find me the latest best odds for tonights match between Liverpool and Manachester united. After that, please log into my account on betfair.com and place a bet, if the odds are greater than 2.4 for Liverpool to win. Oh, and order me a Coke at Just-eat.com! Nice.
Nova Spivack said…
it could function like a kind of expert assistant, with all the facts and computational power in the world at our fingertips.
One potential use would be in the domain of CDSS (clinical decision support system). Wolfram’s system would be useful for health practitioners in giving shortcuts to complex medical diagnostic problems.
Various types of CDSS had been available over the years for different medical domains and they’re still improving, but I can imagine a CDSS based on Wolfram Alpha’s system would be awesome.
One of the earliest CDSS available was called Mycin, a medical expert system developed at Stanford in the 1970s. This Mycin expert system was designed to identify bacteria causing severe infections, such as bacteremia and meningitis, and to recommend antibiotics, with the dosage adjusted for patient’s body weight. Research conducted at the Stanford Medical School found MYCIN to propose an acceptable therapy in about 69% of cases, which was better than the performance of infectious disease human experts who were judged using the same criteria.
It was obvious that Mycin outperformed human experts, but it never went commercial. Despite , Mycin’s success, others had raised ethical and legal issues related to the use of computers in medicine — if a program gives the wrong diagnosis or recommends the wrong therapy, who should be held responsible?
I would say, that Wolfram Alpha’s would be a tremendous help in the medical domains for developing knowledge-based CDSS. Such CDSS should be used to guide the medical practitioner and not to make the decision for the practitioner, because I still wouldn’t trust an unsupervised computer program to prescribe me drugs for my illness’s treatment.
“I still wouldn’t trust an unsupervised computer program to prescribe me drugs for my illness’s treatment” I would have written “Supervised or unsupervised computer program”…
The last two lines of your comment are the only ones that make some sense, because it addresses reality.
You are correct that computers have been used for many years to help with medical diagnoses and treatments. There is progress made but we will never get to the point that machines will treat us… For many reasons; first, medicine is a science [not an exact one] and above all, is an “art” –every single clinical situation is different.
This approach is fairly popular in academia including the integration with the Internet. It fails daily in real medical practice, despite Hollywood’s productions…
Just imagine that at this point a lot of “research” is being conducted to get your doctor to talk to you more than five minutes… “sans the laptop.”
For those who haven’t heard/know of the man’s work (Dr. Wolfram), here is a wikipedia on him:
http://en.wikip...Stephen_Wolfram
Before jumping to dismiss the man’s idea, try and follow what he has done in the past in his career as a scientist (except his business & being entrepreneurship).
Eh, who needs all that computational something when we’ve got http://www.what...thewebthink.com
intelligent adaptive semantic search, wow this sounds so fucking amazing that.. [Property of Google Inc]
Dammit…
How has IP / business model / architecture been addressed? From past form, might we assume that Wolfram intends to sell high-end, closed source, packaged software referencing proprietary algorithms hosted on a centralised internet domain ?
I loved this concept when it was called CYC (http://www.cyc.com/).
Adding a web front-end *is* an innovation of sorts, I guess.
This is going to be huge.
This is going to be REALLY huge.
Can’t wait to see the Android and iPhone versions!
Wolfram should add text to speach on the Android/iPhone versions just like Google. That would make it wicked good.
Record the ogg/mp3 file on the phone with the SDK API, send it to the server and do the text to speech there, and return the results.
text to speech should be speech to text. typo, sorry.
We should only judge this project when it is available in the public domain. It is no point trying to judge the hype or the possible potential.
Yes it may be another Cuiil, but if it is much more innovative then the departed Google Answers, then maybe this project has legs to survie.
Like the joke about Wolfram Alpha = Skynet.
By the way both Terminator Salvation and Wolfram Alpha are both scheduled for release in May 2009.
There should be plenty of mileage in creating Media Hype from both projects through innovative Mash-up ideas.
Sounds truly amazing but definitely needs a new name. “Wolfram” causes the uses to doubt pronunciation and that is a proven mental roadblock for remembrance and discussion. Seriously, it may sound nitpicky but you MUST change the name.
it would take a pretty stupid person to not be able to pronounce that.
do i like the name? no.
are there lots of stupid people in this thread?
i’ve only read about 4 intelligent comments.
I won’t dismiss this like other comments have. Reason being is that Wolfram is incredibly smart and has proven himself, so I’ll wait to see when it comes out. Definately sounds exciting. At least someone is thinking big out there..
Best of luck to the team.
Dismissive? It’s like a douchebag dogpile on Wolfram in here.
It seems unlikely that all of you critics both understand and reject his work with cellular automata. If you don’t you can basically STFU for not having a useful opinion.
Skeptical? Of course. But *someone* is going to eventually accomplish this and Wolfram is perfectly suited to be the one to do it.
I asked it: What is Cuil 2.0?
And it said: Wolfram alpha
I guess it works.
I have used wolfram products a year before and i was amazed by how powerful those were specially those math programs..
1. Give an equation. He will graph it. Integrate it. Differentiate it. Find the solution. [ That is amazing.. And it calculates so fast ]
Wolfram was genius. Is a genius. A genius whose works needs to be recognized publicly.
to improve search we need the semantic web. ‘Search’ is also about finding factual answer, so SW is trying to engineer something this is evolving anyway out of the internet as we speak .
Can he do it better and faster – possibly. He is smart enough, but does he have a sharing culture?
Sounds cuil!
Fantastic comment. Very smart.
I read this article when it was on Twine (via delicious), and the same question keeping coming back to me:
How do we know if/when Wolfram Alpha gives us the WRONG answer?
Do we just take its word for it? Every system has bugs, and something as complicated as this is bound to be wrong on a regular basis.
Of course, information that Google pulls up is just as (maybe more) likely to be wrong, biased, outdated, or whatever. But with 1000’s of search results to compare, one can usually derive the right answer pretty easily, by comparing the answer across a range of different sites.
We can also see which sites the information is coming from. If I ask “how many black-on-white crimes there were in Alabama last year,” I might get a very different answer from the KKK website than from the Southern Poverty Law Center website. It’s hugely important to CONSIDER THE SOURCE of the information.
But Wolfram Alpha is proposing to calculate answers on-the-fly, meaning there’s no transparency to how the answer was arrived at, what inputs were used to calculate the answer and how accurate/objective those are, etc. That’s pretty sketchy.
OMG!!! web 100.0 is right around the corner,
Sharpen your pencil tim o’reilly — put an architecture diagram to describe it.
Wow, I can’t believe so many people here are bashing this story. Wolfram is a genius, if you don’t know that, than you just don’t know who he is. I think he is arrogant and he over-sold the importance of his book, but he is a computing genius. If you read that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Bill Joy, or Ray Kurzweil invented this would you be more excited? Wolfram is on their level.
I think Wolfram’s best move will be selling this to Google and letting them run with it. Don’t try to build a new search engine to compete with Google. Sell it to Google and watch it go to a whole new level of A.I. that will be life-changing for everyone.
Have it take two sentences from news article and see if it can generate a third plausible sentence from them. For example:
FIRST SENTENCE:
“He started his goodbyes with a morning audience with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, sharing coffee, tea, cookies and his desire for a golf match with her son, Prince Andrew”
SECOND SENTENCE:
“The visit came after Clinton made the rounds through Ireland and Northern Ireland to offer support for the flagging peace process there.”
Here is a possible third sentence generated from the previous two in real time with by an existing AI system, that runs on about PC power hardware:
“The two leaders also discussed bilateral cooperation in various fields.”
Maybe Wolfram’s can generate that level of understanding but given this guys past history, I have to see tests of his system.
Way too much hype, but still… the Singularity is nearer…
Talk is cheap. Show me quantitative results…
Should be a source of hilarity when it produces funny answers.
Is this the Matrix?
Will Neo save us from it?
Anyway…
My prediction: it will be cool indeed. But I believe “enthusiastic” articles like this tend to be bad for soon to be released stuff.
I for one, want to sign up to try it.
Sounds like this is the Segway of Web 2.0.
Cyc anyone?
Really cool if it works. It failed once (Cyc as a general AI), but someone might make it work. Let’s wait and see.
Andraz Tori
Cool design… i’m try not work…