Stephen Wolfram Speaks About His New Question Answering Engine

singularityhub.com

17 pointskkleiner3 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=549398

That link is worth expanding (Rudy Rucker interview, also quoted source of singularityhub piece): http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/wolframalpha-search...

And in that page, the tail 'Resource' links include this: http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.htm...

which is the Jorge Luis Borges essay with the amusing mention of a system of animal classification: "(a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame ..."

Borges lucidly nails the Achilles' heel - the definition of the database scheme. I stand by my less insightful comment of three weeks ago - care and feeding of 'fact databases' is hard (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=520281)

I know Wolfram Alpha is going to be great, no doubt about the genius behind it. But the first time I heard of it, it was presented as a google killer which gave it a bad reputation as overhyped and cuil-like image.

I like their new image. They do one thing and they do it like nobody else before.

Kudos to Stephen Wolfram and his team.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com