Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming | Hacker News Reader

Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming

blog.wolfram.com

86 pointsbdfh4238 comments

I wish he provided more technical detail as to what differentiates this from every other attempt at exposing a general learning algorithm + NLP to the web. Beside the Wolfram brand-name, there's little reason to elevate this above 'curiosity I'll watch out of the corner of my eye' status.

It sounded to me like it was "This problem requires both brute force and cleverness, and I have supplied both.":

"But with a mixture of Mathematica and NKS automation, and a lot of human experts, I’m happy to say that we’ve gotten a very long way.... 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."

(Ellipses covers several paragraphs in this case.)

The big stopper in some sense has not been the cleverness, but the brute force necessary, because without the brute force collection and translation, there's nothing to be clever with. I, too, am "wait and see", but this could be valuable.

It sounds to me like an expert system. What I can't see is how it's different to any other kind of expert system. Just more data?

There is no mention of "learning algorithms" or stuff of that nature in the post. Its a different approach:

"But if one’s already made knowledge computable, one doesn’t need to do that kind of natural language understanding. All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do."

The nlp involved is quite different from the mainstream direction.

Actually, I'm not sure if the Wolfram brand name is a reason to pay attention to this, or to deliberately ignore it. It's being described as a cross between Mathematica and <i>A New Kind of Science</i>; the first is wonderful, the second is a new kind of stupid, and I'm not sure which one will win.

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/

edit:

found out this little gem - Sergey Brin, before google, was an intern at Wolfram

source: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/news/2004-10-13/google/

and a letter from feynman to wolfram (only res I could find) http://bp3.blogger.com/_6pUR-THE-y4/Rh0pW_ZhckI/AAAAAAAAACI/...

Where's the Feynman letter from?

Sounds like a sequel to the Cyc project, but with more resources being thrown at it

Nope, Cyc was built off a ridiculously complicated upper ontology using $80M+ over 25 years.

Who uses Cyc?

Apparently various parts of the US security apparatus.

Google Techtalk by Dr. Lenat http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-7704388615049492068

Let's put Wolfram and Lenat together; maybe their ambition will reach critical mass and create some sort of black hole.

Good idea, but not likely. If ambition was a weak attractive force, like gravity, then ego would be a localized, strong repulsive force, like two positive electro-magnetic forces.

Estimating the ego of Wolfram and Lenat, it would take somewhere on the order of 10^9 ambitious geniuses for the net force of ambition to overcome the local force of ego.

I wonder if this is actually going to work, or if it's going to be like every other failed attempt at this kind of thing - ie amusing at first but far too limited to be genuinely useful.

the difference in approach is outlined in the following paragraphs:

"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. So how can we deal with that? Well, some people have thought the way forward must be to somehow automatically understand the natural language that exists on the web. Perhaps getting the web semantically tagged to make that easier. But armed with Mathematica and NKS I realized there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable."

(eg, the crucial formula is algorithms to compute further information from curated, trusted data)

so he scripted google and fed it all into a learning algorithm?

what is meant by curated data is the opposite of what google does, eg http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/NewIn70Comput...

(google has pretty much admitted it does a horrible job with structured information...)

Sounds hype-ish, and loose on details... why are they doing this on their own, not publishing it in peer-reviewed journals?

That's just the way the Wolf-man rolls.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science#Methodolo...

You do realise that industry has tons and tons of research that has never been published. Most academics I know have never searched the patent database, which is only the tip of the iceberg.

Because "they" is Stephen Wolfram. :-)

Are they going to call the beta version "Wolfram|Alpha Beta?"

I'm reminded of the hype surrounding Cuil. So, does this system do anything for my mom? She's not really the math-y sort. From Wolfram's blog post, I wasn't able to determine what's in it for me. Or, are we way too early for that?

It seems to me like a cross between Wikipedia with curated data, Mathematica, and Google Calculator. You can ask it a wide variety of things, in natural language, and it is supposed to get the answer right fairly often. We'll see.

The important thing being that you can ask it new and novel questions. it sounds in fact something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_ratiocinator as interpreted in The Baroque Cycle

Building knowledge on top of the huge algorithmic base of Mathematica, gives this a fighting chance of doing something significant.

Why? Mathematica does not have access to magical algorithms that none of the rest of us know about, nor does it have any particular performance benefits when it comes to implementing specific algorithms. It is a great exploratory tool and an exceptional "generalist" in computer mathematics, but beyond that it does not offers much that can't be done better/faster by a couple of smart people writing some tight application-specific code.

> Mathematica does not have access to magical algorithms that none of the rest of us know about

Yes it does. Quite a lot of them, especially w.r.t. symbolic equation-solving and integration. They're notoriously protective of their trade secrets.

So what exactly can be done with a system like this? What types of problems does it solve?

First, we will ask it what problems it would like to solve.

So it seems to me that alpha is going to try to create mathematical models from unstructured data found on the web and match them with similar models generated from natural language queries entered by the users. I'm sure probabilistic NLP methods are used extensively and I can see maybe how Mathematica can compute these quickly. But what the bleep is the role of NKS? From what little I know, I can speculate that he might have modeled statistical inference using CAs and so can constrain the probability space of matches?? Jebus I need to know more or forget what I know already, anything in between is frustrating.

I respect Wolfram because he has the means to do whatever he likes, even if everyone else thinks it's crazy. That's real academic freedom.

Obligatory Wolfram primer:

1) http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/

2) http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math/msg/37f51351f5340e58...

Doesn't look like Wolfram|Alpha is even breathing hard.

That's all well and good, but when will Mathematica Home Edition be available in the UK so we can play with this stuff ourselves?

I do hope they improve the color scheme and the "computational knowledge search engine" tag line.

Exited and interesting approach. Adding more schematic will help such a system so it's working with time. Also seems to have the right kind of mad scientists.

Is Wolfram the new Xerox Parc?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com