We'll see if this ends up being another Cuil, or another useful
tool. Either way, it's certainly not going to live up to the hype
or have very far-reaching effects.
There's nothing new about curating a big set of data and wrapping a
nice GUI around it, not even if you write the whole thing in
Mathematica. The talking heads are going bonkers over it, but the
tech community, the actual programmers and engineers, is a mix of
wait-and-see, and outright scorn.
How could a piece of vaporware called a Knowledge Computation
Engine really do anything besides hiss and steam?
Andrew
On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 9:17 PM, R E Sieber <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Holy @#%$^! I want the API - Renee
(Note how much of this is about semantic searches of geography.)
May 3, 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/an-invention-that-could-change-the-internet-for-ever-1678109.html
An invention that could change the internet for ever
Revolutionary new web software could put giants such as Google in
the shade when it comes out later this month. Andrew Johnson reports
The biggest internet revolution for a generation will be unveiled
this month with the launch of software that will understand
questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the
web has never managed before.
The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in
the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider
to be the internet's Holy Grail – a global store of information
that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way
a person does.
Although the system is still new, it has already produced massive
interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet
watchers.
Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an
evolutionary leap in the development of the internet. Nova
Spivack, an internet and computer expert, said that Wolfram Alpha
could prove just as important as Google. "It is really impressive
and significant," he wrote. "In fact it may be as important for
the web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.
Tom Simpson, of the blog Convergenceofeverything.com, said: "What
are the wider implications exactly? A new paradigm for using
computers and the web? Probably. Emerging artificial intelligence
and a step towards a self-organising internet? Possibly... I think
this could be big."
Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions
such as "how high is Mount Everest?", but it will also produce a
neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as
geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains,
complete with graphs and charts.
The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out
"on the fly", according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen
Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to
the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask
what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was
assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it
about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in "10 flips for
four heads" and it will guess that you need to know the
probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next
solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of
the International Space Station, it can work it out.
Dr Wolfram, an award-winning physicist who is based in America,
added that the information is "curated", meaning it is assessed
first by experts. This means that the weaknesses of sites such as
Wikipedia, where doubts are cast on the information because anyone
can contribute, are taken out. It is based on his best-selling
Mathematica software, a standard tool for scientists, engineers
and academics for crunching complex maths.
"I've wanted to make the knowledge we've accumulated in our
civilisation computable," he said last week. "I was not sure it
was possible. I'm a little surprised it worked out so well."
Dr Wolfram, 49, who was educated at Eton and had completed his PhD
in particle physics by the time he was 20, added that the launch
of Wolfram Alpha later this month would be just the beginning of
the project.
"It will understand what you are talking about," he said. "We are
just at the beginning. I think we've got a reasonable start on 90
per cent of the shelves in a typical reference library."
The engine, which will be free to use, works by drawing on the
knowledge on the internet, as well as private databases. Dr
Wolfram said he expected that about 1,000 people would be needed
to keep its databases updated with the latest discoveries and
information.
He also added that he would not go down the road of storing
information on ordinary people, although he was aware that others
might use the technology to do so.
Wolfram Alpha has been designed with professionals and academics
in mind, so its grasp of popular culture is, at the moment,
comparatively poor. The term "50 Cent" caused "absolute horror" in
tests, for example, because it confused a discussion on currency
with the American rap artist. For this reason alone it is unlikely
to provide an immediate threat to Google, which is working on a
similar type of search engine, a version of which it launched last
week.
"We have a certain amount of popular culture information," Dr
Wolfram said. "In some senses popular culture information is much
more shallowly computable, so we can find out who's related to who
and how tall people are. I fully expect we will have lots of
popular culture information. There are linguistic horrors because
if you put in books and music a lot of the names clash with other
concepts."
He added that to help with that Wolfram Alpha would be using
Wikipedia's popularity index to decide what users were likely to
be interested in.
With Google now one of the world's top brands, worth $100bn,
Wolfram Alpha has the potential to become one of the biggest names
on the planet.
Dr Wolfram, however, did not rule out working with Google in the
future, as well as Wikipedia. "We're working to partner with all
possible organisations that make sense," he said. "Search,
narrative, news are complementary to what we have. Hopefully there
will be some great synergies."
What the experts say
"For those of us tired of hundreds of pages of results that do not
really have a lot to do with what we are trying to find out,
Wolfram Alpha may be what we have been waiting for."
Michael W Jones, Tech.blorge.com <http://Tech.blorge.com>
"If it is not gobbled up by one of the industry superpowers, his
company may well grow to become one of them in a small number of
years, with most of us setting our default browser to be Wolfram
Alpha."
Doug Lenat, Semanticuniverse.com
"It's like plugging into an electric brain."
Matt Marshall, Venturebeat.com
"This is like a Holy Grail... the ability to look inside data
sources that can't easily be crawled and provide answers from them."
Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of searchengineland.com
<http://searchengineland.com>
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