On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 9:04 PM, Mike Liebhold <[email protected]> wrote:
A Wolfram Research person's hard working Mathematica hacks to map
his
outdoor excursions:
http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/04/17/mapping-gps-data/
as much skepticism I have for Wolfram Alpha, I have even more
amazement at the stuff Mathematica can do. Here is a post from
Wolfram's blog that I noted a few months ago
http://blog.wolfram.com/2008/12/01/the-incredible-convenience-of-mathematica-image-processing/
If only remote sensing had been so much fun. Just for the above, I
will buy Mathematica and futz around with it.
Now, that same Theodore Gray (the one who shows fun ways of doing
image processing in the link above) has this to say about the role
of
Mathematica in the creation of Alpha
"This is the essence of what has made Wolfram|Alpha possible. It’s
not
so much that it would have been impossible to do without
Mathematica,
but that it would have been impractically difficult. In fact, the
easiest way to create Wolfram|Alpha without Mathematica would have
been to write Mathematica first, then use it. Which is precisely
what
we have spent the past 23 years doing"
See
http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/01/the-secret-behind-the-computational-engine-in-wolframalpha/
Wolfram seems to have a mindset similar to the Goog's... the
solution
to every problem lies in data. The more data you can gather and
analyze, the better solution you can create. Google's approach seems
to be that the world is their data, and they analyze it as is,
programmatically, more less with the internet and its openness as
their modus operandi, while Wolfram wants to take the data, dice it,
prep it, dress it using their own finite experts and their own
proprietary code. I am not expressing it well, but that is my
uninformed but intuitive gist of what I think the difference is
between Google and Alpha. And then there are the breed of new
aggregators/filter-ers such as kosmix and the ilk (see
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/business/15ping.html). In any
case,
fine by me... as long as data can be free, we will see Wolfram's
Alpha, someone else's Beta, and everyone's Gamma.
--
Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org/
Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org/
Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org/
Science Commons Fellow, Geospatial Data http://sciencecommons.org
Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/
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