A Sneak Preview of Wolfram Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine

cyber.law.harvard.edu

30 pointsmadh5 comments

Is this really going to be that amazing, or is Stephen Wolfram just flapping his gums?

I hope it isn't as game changing as the Segway was...

It is a New Kind of Search until proven otherwise ..

What they are promising to achieve is simply impossible to do. It assumes you could do logical and mathematical inferrence at the level of a Ph.D student...

... oh wait. I'm actually the one who wrote a review of Mathematica for MacWorld 15 years ago and said that it can reason to a level as good as a Ph.D student.

My opinion: there is about one person on earth who can pull this off, and this is the team. So I have great expectations.

I would argue that the hard problem is not "reasoning" (taking absolute truths and deriving other truths); but rather dealing with noise.

The former problem -- logic -- ended up giving us the AI winter, and it's the later (with machine learning) that is driving Google and modern robotics.

If this is just Mathematica + Prolog + A giant hand tuned database, I think it'll be a disappointment. (Look at the Cyc project -- led by a former Stanford professor, lots of funding, supposed to revolutionize human knowledge -- where is it now?)

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