There was a great article on hplus magazine by Rudy Rucker, whose life seems to have been entwined with Wolfram for a long time. Rudy seems to have got an early dose of the excitment I’ve picked up around Wolfram’s plans.

He quotes Stephen Wolfram as saying:

Wolfram|Alpha isn’t really a search engine, because we compute the answers, and we discover new truths. If anything, you might call it a platonic search engine, unearthing eternal truths that may never have been written down before.

he goes on to explain that:

Wolfram|Alpha can pop out an answer to pretty much any kind of factual question that you might pose to a scientist, economist, banker, or other kind of expert. The exciting part is that you’re not just looking up pages on the web, you’re getting new information that’s generated by computations working from the known data.

Stephen Wolfram seems confident that he will be able to cope with capacity issues:

Most of our computational needs center on converting user inputs into Mathematica-like queries, and then computing the answers to these queries. Answering one query might use a hundred of our computers running flat out for a fraction of a second. So we’re still trying to gauge how many computers we’ll need.

I’m itching to see this in action, but if it is as good as it sounds, will Wolfram sell out to the highest bidder once this is off the ground?

I’m not a selling things kind of guy, …
We’d rather look for things like partnerships or licensing deals or APIs. I see a new field of knowledge-based computing. Imagine a spread sheet that can pull in knowledge about the entries.

A spreadsheet, or a business intelligence platform? Imagine Wolfram|Alpha’s computational natural language interface licensed to interface with all of the data on the web, the logical structures in Wolfram|Alpha, …, and all of your corporate data! That could be an explosive combination: the Power to Dream?

SAS bloggers, such as Tammi Kay George and Waynette Tubbs, have been talking about Data Driven Management Culture and how to Make the Most of a Bad Situation: Analytics.

Which prompt me to ask two questions:

• How soon before this scientific development is suborned to commercial ends?
• Would this be a bad thing?

Technorati Tags: alpha, SAS, wolfram

What will it do with questions deliberately constructed to be difficult, either because of the amount of computational power required, or because they are self-referential? How will it handle paradox such along the lines of Smullyan’s “what is the name of this book?” Godel’s incompleteness theorem surely limits the validity, in the limit, of the answers it can produce. The other way to test it would be with questions such as “what is the nth prime?” where n is large.

I’m fascinated by what it will look like. I’d love it if the black box had glass sides – it will be interesting to see what they publish (eg: statistics for requests, requests actioned, solutions, etc.

Will there be an faq section?

Will there be a Web2.0 element? To my mind, a database of answers and a system for users to score and/or tag the answers would be valuble. This could either be used to iterate the algorithm to improve on near misses, or to suggest similar questions and answers along with the specific “custom” solution.

PS: has anyone noticed that if you write the initials in Greek you get omega|alpha? With the pipe standing for from, or given, (as it does in some set theory notations) it then becomes omega given alpha, which looks suspiciously close to becoming alpha and omega.

Technorati Tags: alpha, paradox, questions, well-formed, wolfram

If I were to ask: what would be the velocity of a point mass falling for 10 seconds under gravity, will I get the answer:

Solution: velocity = 98m/s

or might the answer look more like:

Solution: velocity = 98m/s
Domain of knowledge: Newtonian Physics
v = a t, substitute a = g = 9.8m/s², and t = 10s.

Will the natural language processor be able to convert the mechanical solution back to a comprehensible set of instructions?

Technorati Tags: answers, Wolfram|Alpha

Any ideas for more imaginative, or non-intuitive uses?

How about

proc alpha;
   q='';
run;

Technorati Tags: alpha, SAS, wolfram

I showed him this website and he was shocked, because he says that given this guy’s record (unbearable genius, but genius nevertheless), he might actually be able to deliver what he promises, and this would be mind-boggling – at least so my friend believes.

So let’s wait till May… I think the whole thing is fascinating, and wonder if there is a hardwired answer to “what is the question who’s answer is 42″ and similar. I’m itching to know what questions people will be asking.

I hope that Wolfram is set up to cope with the volume of requests. If people start to take notice, if Wolfram | Alpha goes viral, they may be deluged with a huge flock of browsers.

Technorati Tags: alpha, wolfram

In his recent blog post Stephen Wolfram tries to answer some of these questions:

What is Wolfram|Alpha, then?

It’s going to be a website: www.wolframalpha.com. With one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms.

What does that mean?

…one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer…
I’d always thought, though, that eventually it should be possible. And a few years ago, I realized that I was finally in a position to try to do it.

But that’s never going to work is it?

I wasn’t at all sure it was going to work. 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.

Wow! Google, your days are numbered!

Technorati Tags: alpha, google, wolfram