Found this article that might be of interest ( http://mechape.blogspot.com/
):
I'm eagerly waiting to see what kind of surprise is brewing under the
guise of "computational knowledge engine" called Wolfram Alpha
announced by Steven Wolfram in March and settled to debut in May.
Steven Wolfram was widely credited for his Mathematica software
package and equally criticized for the book "A New Kind of
Science” ,abbreviated NKS , explained his new creation :
I had two crucial ingredients: Mathematica and NKS. With
Mathematica, I had a symbolic language to represent anything—as well
as the algorithmic power to do any kind of computation. And with NKS,
I had a paradigm for understanding how all sorts of complexity could
arise from simple rules.
But what about all the actual knowledge that we as humans have
accumulated?
A lot of it is now on the web—in billions of pages of text. And
with search engines, we can very efficiently search for specific terms
and phrases in that text.
But we can’t compute from that. And in effect, we can only answer
questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things
up, but we can’t figure anything new out
While many dubbed it like a potential Google killer I don't expect
from Wolfram|Alpha to be used in mass on the Google scale. Essentially
it is not a general searching tool, but is meant to become a tool for
"truth discovery". But the truth is that most people are not looking
for computable "truth discovery", they are sufficed with finding the
facts and then using their own brains to accomodate that data to build
their own knowledge base.
I won't be as cynical as Ted Dziuba who wrote :
"That sounds an awful lot like the marriage of some Python scripts
with a few hundred bucks spent hiring third world workers through
Amazon Mechanical Turk.".
(A blog for the WA was launched http://blog.wolframalpha.com/ )
Speaking of search engines and our latest global fever i tried Cuil
(almost forgotten another Google-killer) to search for "swine flu" and
i was kinda surprised. On the first page i found link pointing to one
very good article describing 1976 swine flu case. And another link
about recombination of birds and pigs flu virus genes, which dates
from 2007, not exactly the last news as you might wrongly infer from
the current media frenzy. If you had already encyclopedic info which
you can find in Wikipedia those additional pieces are good hits and
they are not easily found with general purpose search engines. What
this is good for explaining knowledge ? When you have initial base you
need the tools for finding more deep knowledge. And this is exactly
what is lacking both in Wolfram Alpha project and even upcoming
semantic web with all their ontologies. We don't have formal
understanding what is "deep knowledge" which could also be adjusted
according to the users needs.
I think this reflects another leap in technology as extension of
self. What do YOU think?
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