3 ms·

Mathematica man brews AI Google Killer

42 points by twampss 18y ago

jeroen 18y ago
More (new to old): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510579 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510579 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507360 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507360 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507172 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507172 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=504411 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=504411
mtarnovan 18y ago
Regarding AI & systematic knowledge: "No, computers haven't solved this problem because there are no people who actually need it solved." Is this guy serious ?
- StrawberryFrog 18y ago
  He's Ted Dziuba. Which pretty much means "no".
rees 18y ago
let's wait and see.
dhimes 18y ago
I'm actually excited about this project. Wolfram does the kinds of things I could imagine myself doing if I was smarter.
- spoiledtechie 18y ago
  Maybe you should just do instead of saying you wish you were smarter.
  - dhimes 18y ago
    I do what I can, thanks.
  - sfphotoarts 18y ago
    This running shoe philosophy is fine in high school, but accepting that there are differences in ability between us all is an important aspect to maturity.
    - d0mine 18y ago
      "Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." -- Calvin Coolidge http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=340466 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=340466
      - yters 18y ago
        I hear Einstein, Newton, and Guass all had IQs of about 100, give or take 100.
dandelany 18y ago
Mathematica Alpha has officially been initiated into the gaggle of existing semantic web apps, now that it's been referred to as a "Google killer" in a linkbaity headline. Lets just hope it doesnt suffer the fate of Cuil. All joking aside, I'm really excited to begin playing with this and exploring the possibilities of a live web inference engine. I'm anxious to see what kind of API/developer tools will be provided, and (since it's Mathematica) whether there will be any cost involved. Has anyone seen this discussed anywhere?
k0n2ad 18y ago
I thought Wolfram Alpha wasn't aiming to be an "AI"?
- Anon84 18y ago
  It will be a "New Kind of AI (tm)"
- StrawberryFrog 18y ago
  Everything is AI until a computer can do it. Seriously, in the 1950s a computer was an "electronic brain" when it could add up numbers and get the right total. In the 1980s it was when it could play chess as well as a novice (basic minimax trees). It's always a moving target.
jpendry 18y ago
wow. this article is horribly biased. i went to a lecture wolfram gave at my university when he was touring for NKS. he would answer a question from a CS professor until he went over the CS professor's head, then a biologist until he went over his head, then a physicist until he went over her head. flippantly passing off that level of genius by calling him "the lovable George Costanza of the mathematics community" says something. i understand wolfram has a huge ego, but that does not belittle his accomplishments. just because your work "ruffled some feathers in the scientific community" currently, does not mean that it won't be considered ground breaking in 100 years. to be clear, i'm referring to how scientists become attached to their life's work and thus biased, as opposed to anything specific to wolfram or NKS and cellular automata. finally, Alpha will be judged when it comes out. if it's worthwhile great, if not fine, but there's not much point in trying to persuade people of something before it is out.
- Angostura 18y ago
  Did he actually go over their heads? Or did he just become too hard to follow?
  - jpendry 18y ago
    fair enough, i didn't word that well. what i was trying to convey was simply that he was holding conversations with computer scientists, biologists, and physicists each in their respective languages, which to me is pretty impressive.
- andreyf 18y ago
  I used to feel exactly this way about Wolfram until I actually talked to some of my professors about him... they pointed out that this framing is unique to student's experience - where some of our peers really do know more than others. But most professors have been passionately studying their fields full-time for longer than you've been alive (some, probably longer than the two of us, combined)... at that point, not being able to communicate is a matter of misusing or misunderstanding jargon, not of "knowing more" than someone else or "going over their head". As brilliant as he is, it seems Wolfram is rather guilty of disregarding a lot of the work already done in the fields he works in - coming up with his own jargon for parallel (published) ideas, and hyping up his unreleased work instead of publishing and just letting it speak for itself (like alpha). Research is more about advancing the understanding of science in the community than it is about doing something brilliant on your own (because as brilliant as it is, if one can't communicate it, it'll die with the individual), and so Wolfram deserves quite a lot more criticism than he gets.
snorkel 18y ago
"Google Killer": The tech journalists' kiss of death. "AI Google Killer": The kiss of death and a box of poisoned chocolates. I get the impression that tech journalists purposely overhype new ideas just so 6 months later they can trash the very thing they overhyped for not living up to its expectations. Job security for tech journalists.
programnature 18y ago
The article makes some good points, but unfortunately is based on 0 firsthand knowledge. Yes, machine learning+semantic web "sounds like" like oil. But neither of those technologies are very relevant to alpha. Yes, prolog had an algorithm for making deductions. But the point of alpha is not to make logical deductions, but to run computational models and analysis based on a vast dataset and human input. The idea that alpha "answers your question" is something that wolfram implicitly put out there in his blog post, but often its more like a computational version of wikipedia.. you enter an entity and visualization-heavy page is generated to explain and explore it. Hand-curating data and algorithms may sound silly to someone who hasn't built something as big as Mathematica, but the world of important/relevant data and algorithms is ultimately finite in size (if very large and complicated).
ableal 18y ago
The key phrase in the original announcement is "explicitly curate all data". This was tried before, in the "expert systems" of the 1980s. Prolog and various 'production system' languages (e.g. OPS5) would decouple facts/rules from the execution engine. Then "just add" domain knowledge ... As far as I can tell, what killed that was the unfeasibility of debugging. One bad item (or the lack of a critical true one) could poison the well, and good luck tracking it down. The care and feeding of proper 'fact databases' remains expensive, and Google doesn't seem disposed to go there, apart from unit and currency conversions. (Add a 'hmm' for automated translation.) So, this leaves two ideas for 'Alpha' as a product: a) they believe the database grooming expense can be profitable on a global web scale; b) they automated enough of the database grooming to make it profitable.
robotrout 18y ago
Yellow Journalism at it's finest. "The George Costanza of the mathematics community", he calls him. Must be nice to always be a critic, and never have to create anything real.

42 points by twampss 18y ago

More (new to old): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510579 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510579 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507360 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507360 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507172 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507172 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=504411 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=504411

mtarnovan 18y ago

Regarding AI & systematic knowledge: "No, computers haven't solved this problem because there are no people who actually need it solved." Is this guy serious ?

StrawberryFrog 18y ago
He's Ted Dziuba. Which pretty much means "no".

rees 18y ago

let's wait and see.

dhimes 18y ago

I'm actually excited about this project. Wolfram does the kinds of things I could imagine myself doing if I was smarter.

spoiledtechie 18y ago
Maybe you should just do instead of saying you wish you were smarter.
- dhimes 18y ago
  I do what I can, thanks.
- sfphotoarts 18y ago
  This running shoe philosophy is fine in high school, but accepting that there are differences in ability between us all is an important aspect to maturity.
  - d0mine 18y ago
    "Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." -- Calvin Coolidge http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=340466 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=340466
    - yters 18y ago
      I hear Einstein, Newton, and Guass all had IQs of about 100, give or take 100.

dandelany 18y ago

Mathematica Alpha has officially been initiated into the gaggle of existing semantic web apps, now that it's been referred to as a "Google killer" in a linkbaity headline. Lets just hope it doesnt suffer the fate of Cuil. All joking aside, I'm really excited to begin playing with this and exploring the possibilities of a live web inference engine. I'm anxious to see what kind of API/developer tools will be provided, and (since it's Mathematica) whether there will be any cost involved. Has anyone seen this discussed anywhere?

k0n2ad 18y ago

I thought Wolfram Alpha wasn't aiming to be an "AI"?

Anon84 18y ago
It will be a "New Kind of AI (tm)"
StrawberryFrog 18y ago
Everything is AI until a computer can do it. Seriously, in the 1950s a computer was an "electronic brain" when it could add up numbers and get the right total. In the 1980s it was when it could play chess as well as a novice (basic minimax trees). It's always a moving target.

jpendry 18y ago

wow. this article is horribly biased. i went to a lecture wolfram gave at my university when he was touring for NKS. he would answer a question from a CS professor until he went over the CS professor's head, then a biologist until he went over his head, then a physicist until he went over her head. flippantly passing off that level of genius by calling him "the lovable George Costanza of the mathematics community" says something. i understand wolfram has a huge ego, but that does not belittle his accomplishments. just because your work "ruffled some feathers in the scientific community" currently, does not mean that it won't be considered ground breaking in 100 years. to be clear, i'm referring to how scientists become attached to their life's work and thus biased, as opposed to anything specific to wolfram or NKS and cellular automata. finally, Alpha will be judged when it comes out. if it's worthwhile great, if not fine, but there's not much point in trying to persuade people of something before it is out.

Angostura 18y ago
Did he actually go over their heads? Or did he just become too hard to follow?
- jpendry 18y ago
  fair enough, i didn't word that well. what i was trying to convey was simply that he was holding conversations with computer scientists, biologists, and physicists each in their respective languages, which to me is pretty impressive.
andreyf 18y ago
I used to feel exactly this way about Wolfram until I actually talked to some of my professors about him... they pointed out that this framing is unique to student's experience - where some of our peers really do know more than others. But most professors have been passionately studying their fields full-time for longer than you've been alive (some, probably longer than the two of us, combined)... at that point, not being able to communicate is a matter of misusing or misunderstanding jargon, not of "knowing more" than someone else or "going over their head". As brilliant as he is, it seems Wolfram is rather guilty of disregarding a lot of the work already done in the fields he works in - coming up with his own jargon for parallel (published) ideas, and hyping up his unreleased work instead of publishing and just letting it speak for itself (like alpha). Research is more about advancing the understanding of science in the community than it is about doing something brilliant on your own (because as brilliant as it is, if one can't communicate it, it'll die with the individual), and so Wolfram deserves quite a lot more criticism than he gets.

snorkel 18y ago

"Google Killer": The tech journalists' kiss of death. "AI Google Killer": The kiss of death and a box of poisoned chocolates. I get the impression that tech journalists purposely overhype new ideas just so 6 months later they can trash the very thing they overhyped for not living up to its expectations. Job security for tech journalists.

programnature 18y ago

The article makes some good points, but unfortunately is based on 0 firsthand knowledge. Yes, machine learning+semantic web "sounds like" like oil. But neither of those technologies are very relevant to alpha. Yes, prolog had an algorithm for making deductions. But the point of alpha is not to make logical deductions, but to run computational models and analysis based on a vast dataset and human input. The idea that alpha "answers your question" is something that wolfram implicitly put out there in his blog post, but often its more like a computational version of wikipedia.. you enter an entity and visualization-heavy page is generated to explain and explore it. Hand-curating data and algorithms may sound silly to someone who hasn't built something as big as Mathematica, but the world of important/relevant data and algorithms is ultimately finite in size (if very large and complicated).

ableal 18y ago

The key phrase in the original announcement is "explicitly curate all data". This was tried before, in the "expert systems" of the 1980s. Prolog and various 'production system' languages (e.g. OPS5) would decouple facts/rules from the execution engine. Then "just add" domain knowledge ... As far as I can tell, what killed that was the unfeasibility of debugging. One bad item (or the lack of a critical true one) could poison the well, and good luck tracking it down. The care and feeding of proper 'fact databases' remains expensive, and Google doesn't seem disposed to go there, apart from unit and currency conversions. (Add a 'hmm' for automated translation.) So, this leaves two ideas for 'Alpha' as a product: a) they believe the database grooming expense can be profitable on a global web scale; b) they automated enough of the database grooming to make it profitable.

robotrout 18y ago

Yellow Journalism at it's finest. "The George Costanza of the mathematics community", he calls him. Must be nice to always be a critic, and never have to create anything real.