Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces

Brilliant.

Really. This article expresses perfectly everything that is wrong with Wolfram Alpha (which still can't tell me how much an elephant weighs, no matter how many ways I ask it). There are so many stories of users doing ridiculous things because of such hubristic user interfaces. Hang out with non-hackers long enough and you will clearly see how "they create an incomplete model of the giant electronic brain in their own, non-giant, non-electronic brains."

Also, the phrase "non-solution to a non-problem" is the best thing I've read all week.

Absolutely correct.

I had great expectations when I heard from Wolfram Alpha. The things Mathematica is able to do backed by a giant structured data store seemed mind blowing. As the author said the visualization tools and the (still small) dataset _is_ impressive. I thought: We have all this data, all this visualization options and now we can create aggregate and munch all the facts of the world with an ad-hoc query language. But this simply does not work. There is hardly any functionality to really process data (aside from the predefined ways). And if you come to think about it: One cannot think of a way more complex transformations could be expressed with WA's natural language interface.

For me a better interface would look like this: The basic interface is some kind of full-featured expression language to navigate the data hierarchy (perhaps similar to SQL). You could then build some GUI to interactively navigate/parametrize data/transformations to build more complex expressions. To make the system more easily accessible you could then - and only then - add the natural language recognition system on top of this, which tries to guess some expressions from your input string and gives you some suggestions to start from.

As an aside, I don't think I agree with the sentiment of "because it's hard we shouldn't even try". Sometimes you get dead end fields. Sometimes, other useful or interesting things spring out of dead ends.

That said, WA's interface leaves much to be desired. With Google (and its ilk), I can enter almost anything in, and get results. If they're not exactly what I want, I can refine it, little by little. It's like a gradient search in a sense.

With WA, I can't enter almost anything in, and get some sort of results where I can continuously refine my search. Instead, I get deadends where it has no idea what I'm talking about, and I don't know what else to do to help it understand.

In fact, it reminds me of playing the old text-based adventure games, where you have to guess what you can do in the "dingy old cabin with a door to the north." You go crazy asking the computer to "pick up mirror" and it replies, "thoust cannot pickth up the mirror" You really have no idea what you can do, and no hint out of the myriad of possibiliies. You end up playing a guessing game, instead of an adventure game.

I think google squared has the right idea. You can enter in some, and it'll spit back some sort of results, usually with columns you don't want. Then you can proceed to refine those results, by adding columns you want and deleting ones you don't.

Good article (if a bit long). Wolfram Alpha has exactly the kind of interface that you would expect from a company founded by a person that wrote a book called "A New Kind of Science." Stephen Wolfram is a very intelligent person with a world-crushing, fire-breathing ego. This is unfortunate, because a more modest man could create a great tool like Alpha but then assume that he didn't know all of the ways that people would use it, and therefore not require interfacing with it through a broken natural language engine. Wolfram, on the other hand (like many bright people) assumes that only he knows the answers and doesn't bother to think that others might be able to do more with the tool than he could ever think of.

Summary to looooooooong article. Author feels that Wolfram should have an alternative direct interface that does not required AI to interpret the meaning/goal of your natural language text query. Kind of like how Grafiti did for the Palm.

Very nicely written article.

Aside from the alpha discussion, an additional useful point is the concept of too-intelligent interfaces. This is related to two other observations. One is that for high-throughput data entry (also programming) a nice GUI is really not the thing you want. You want to be able to navigate entirely with the keyboard.

The other is wsywig document processors. Serious documentation (such as that for a fighter aircraft, which when printed out weighs more than the aircraft itself, of for documentation required by the FDA for new drugs) is not really done with wsywig editors, but markup editors of different kinds. If you document is 300,000 pages, you want the pagination to be done in batch.

"Give it up for the standardization of the screw."

A memorable quote.

On a related note, there was an interesting C-SPAN BookTv program recently where the author talked about the revolutionary standardization of international freight shipping containers:

http://tinyurl.com/mwmrwq (booktv.org)

It was interesting reading the article thinking "yeah, like the Newton" before the author mentioned the Newton and then "yeah, like the way Google routes to different applications based on the kind of query" before the author mentioned how Google routes to different applications based on the kind of query. Great minds, I guess. :)

If I could double up-vote this article, I would. Surprisingly astute, and I think I learned something about tools and interfaces.

I think Wolfram put up their crazy interface in order to avoid just giving away free online Mathematica. Also to allow Stephen's ego to further blossom.

If you could use WA as a Mathematica console BUT with access to great built-in (crawled!) data and visualization tools, then it would be useful.

Wordy article but I agree on his points. WA is trying to solve a non-existent problem for this particular use case. A person wants to see a label rather than a graph.

Spot on.

If only this were written the week before we were deluged with Wolfram Alpha articles and the attendant hype, here and everywhere else.

On to Chrome OS, then Mencius. We need another reality check on the latest planet-changer.

Even when I'm trying to be really obvious:

http://www01.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=calories+in+a+peanut+...