3 ms·
It wouldn't be the first time the world was promised something from Wolfram that went basically nowhere.
by j2d2 18y ago
It wouldn't be the first time the world was promised something from Wolfram that went basically nowhere.
- jrockway 18y agoA new kind of hype.
- scott_s 18y agoThe Wolf who cried Alpha?
- sketerpot 18y agoOn the other hand, Mathematica is pretty cool. Wolfram is a clever guy with a lot of money. That's worth something.
- spot 18y agomathematica is a reimplementation of similar systems that were already proven to work. alpha is a reimplementation of similar systems that were proven not to work.
- raganwald 18y agoAh, the "witty put down" at its finest! While nothing of this sort has worked to date, the same could have been said of powered flight on December 16, 1903. In any event... Thanks for making me smile :-)
- amichail 18y agoEven if it worked as advertised, what fraction of your search queries is of the factual type that this system would be able to answer?
- jerf 18y agoEasy: Today, zero percent. But the more interesting question is "why is that?" And the answer is that you've used Google for so long that you've thoroughly internalized its capabilities that you think in Google and can't easily see outside of those capabilities. In the programming language context, we call this the Blub paradox, but Blub happens everywhere, and is hardest to see when there is nothing to step up to. If this works (a big if, IMHO, but I'm willing to give it a try), what might happen is that it might entirely recalibrate what queries you can conceive of. Until we see the system, though, it's hard to even begin to imagine what those queries might be. How many queries in 1980 did people wish they could query Google for? Nearly none, not because people didn't have questions Google could answer, but because only a bare handful of visionaries could even conceive of Google.
- colins_pride 18y agoAwesome point. It's also why any serious contender to Google won't really look like Google at all. Because if it looks like Google, then users will interface with it like they're used to interfacing with Google, and then you really have to win by beating Google at its own game. Much better to pick your own place & time.
- amichail 18y agoYou can already ask such questions on Google and get back answers in many cases in the web page snippets. Try this query for example: how many bones are there in the human body? So if you don't normally issue queries of this sort on Google even though you would probably get back an answer in the web page snippets, then perhaps you would not find this new system all that useful.
- JulianMorrison 18y agoGoogle is great for finding random data, but the results generally require human perusal. You couldn't feed them into a running program without at minimum a hand-written screen scraper.