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Wolfram's talent for self-promotion has been nicely demonstrated by the publicity campaign ahead of his WolframAlpha launch. Multiple pre-announcements, screens

by 1gor 17y ago

Wolfram's talent for self-promotion has been nicely demonstrated by the publicity campaign ahead of his WolframAlpha launch. Multiple pre-announcements, screenshots, peek-reviews, demos have been appearing on NH for weeks already. Which may not be a bad thing, except it all comes at a price of credibility. Why does one need to create all that fuzz? Isn't it because the revolutionary product/idea cannot win followers and reputation solely on its merits? Same applies to his book. With a bit of modesty its impact could have been so much greater. Especially since its subject is indeed fascinating.

pj 17y ago
WA would have been much better off if they had slowly released it, gathered feedback and built up knowledge repositories. Why can't you get http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+college+graduates+are+in+the+u.s http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+college+gradua.... But you can get it for each university with http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=harvard+graduates http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=harvard+graduates Seems like it'd be a simple aggregate... Little things like this would be flushed out with a bit of testing over time. The hardest part for WA is going to be figuring out how people want to talk to it, and that will take time.
slackenerny 17y ago
Especially since its [ANKS] subject is indeed fascinating. It is not. Or at best in a sense that Pythagorean Harmony is. Subject has been explored to death long before ANKS. In sixties by every garden variety computer scientist, and in eighties by physicists, giving no insight for either science. Even as an art, his book was few years too late to "generative art" market.
- Tichy 17y ago
  I find it fascinating.
  - slackenerny 17y ago
    And you're in a good company. Feynman for example found it fascinating too, that's why he worked at Thinking Machines and made first cellular automata based QCD simulations. Outcome of this popular fascination is now known as AI-winter.
    - Tichy 17y ago
      That surprises me. My impression was that AI from the AI-winter era has quite the opposite paradigm from NKS (or evolutionary methods or whatever). I thought it was more logic based.
      - slackenerny 17y ago
        NKS (or evolutionary methods or whatever) That'd be it. Can you define the paradigm? State the idea and the method?
        Tichy 17y ago
        To me it is letting complex things emerge from simple rules (like ant paths emerging from simple behaviors of ants). The classical AI approach was more about modeling, knowledge representation, inference rules, decision trees and so on. The only thing related to NKS the classics dabbled with were neural networks. Most of them were also very restricted, though - in order to have a shot at analyzing them, the common neural networks have relatively simple structures. The idea of cellular automata is of course not from Wolfram, but he studied them to an impressive extent. To me they are just one variant of the theme, though. For me NKS is not the invention of evolutionary computation. But it portrays one part of it very well. And he argues that many things could be handled in that way, which was not obvious (I remember how he could imagine the real world to work like an cellular automaton, and still agree with quantum mechanics).
        slackenerny 17y ago
        We started from me claimimg that the subject is not fascinating, by which I understood "interesting scientifically" and not aesthetically or philosophically pleasant. This is a point independent from gauging NKS content itself. You still haven't said what is the scientifical idea. Because I for one don't know. John McCarthy doesn't too, he once hoped to gain such knowledge by careful study, and later remarked regarding Wolfram "In the 1950s I thought that the smallest possible (symbol-state product) universal Turing machine would tell something about the nature of computation. Unfortunately, it didn’t. Instead as simpler universal machines were discovered, the proofs that they were universal became more elaborate, and [so] did the encodings of information." how he could imagine the real world to work like an cellular automaton, and still agree with quantum mechanics Oh, and he got that wrong too... (by the so called No Hidden Variables theorem).
mikedouglas 17y ago
Since when has Hacker News, with its highly entrepreneurial core, ever so viciously attacked publicity? I haven't read NKS, so maybe I don't understand the depths of this man's capital offense, but I see nothing in your list that any smart business won't do. Maybe it isn't revolutionary (whatever that means), but it's a damn cool project that's going to be useful to a lot of people, and isn't that all we care about? Isn't it because the revolutionary product/idea cannot win followers and reputation solely on its merits? If the odds are worse without promotion, what rational human wouldn't use it?
- wheels 17y ago
  Since when has Hacker News, with its highly entrepreneurial core, ever so viciously attacked publicity? I believe the last time was Cuil. Being able to work the hype machine is great, but if you generate more hype than you can deliver on it hurts your image. Since A New Kind of Science was similarly underwhelming, not to mention even more pretentiously hyped, many are cynical.
  - mikedouglas 17y ago
    I believe the last time was Cuil. Cuil's sin was failing at a solved problem, and most plainly, trying to be a "Google killer" (I believe they lectured Google on the size of their search database before they even launched). NLP answer engines aren't a solved problem, and WA was a pretty decent 1.0. Sure it failed techcrunch's vanity test, but for what Wolfram promised in those videos, it performs.
    - wheels 17y ago
      I think what you're saying is true, but it's orthogonal to my point. Both of them generated more hype than they delivered on in their launches and people were underwhelmed. That WA has more promise is a separate matter.
      - slackenerny 17y ago
        It is interesting to parallel Wolfram with Thinking Machines founders. It is a rather little known fact that, trained through TM catastrophe, its founders went on to form a stealth company, called Ab Initio, which is wildly successful despite having no marketing. Indeed they're actively avoiding it through NDA contracts to the point that general public doesn't exactly know what exactly their products do. I am not ridiculing Wolfram, just wanted to point that above is as an interesting anecdote.
huhtenberg 17y ago
> Wolfram's talent for self-promotion has been nicely demonstrated by the publicity campaign ahead of his WolframAlpha launch. What makes you think it was Wolfram's talent per se and not that of some marketing exec ?

by 1gor 17y ago

pj 17y ago

WA would have been much better off if they had slowly released it, gathered feedback and built up knowledge repositories. Why can't you get http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+college+graduates+are+in+the+u.s http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+college+gradua.... But you can get it for each university with http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=harvard+graduates http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=harvard+graduates Seems like it'd be a simple aggregate... Little things like this would be flushed out with a bit of testing over time. The hardest part for WA is going to be figuring out how people want to talk to it, and that will take time.

slackenerny 17y ago

Especially since its [ANKS] subject is indeed fascinating. It is not. Or at best in a sense that Pythagorean Harmony is. Subject has been explored to death long before ANKS. In sixties by every garden variety computer scientist, and in eighties by physicists, giving no insight for either science. Even as an art, his book was few years too late to "generative art" market.

Tichy 17y ago
I find it fascinating.
- slackenerny 17y ago
  And you're in a good company. Feynman for example found it fascinating too, that's why he worked at Thinking Machines and made first cellular automata based QCD simulations. Outcome of this popular fascination is now known as AI-winter.
  - Tichy 17y ago
    That surprises me. My impression was that AI from the AI-winter era has quite the opposite paradigm from NKS (or evolutionary methods or whatever). I thought it was more logic based.
    - slackenerny 17y ago
      NKS (or evolutionary methods or whatever) That'd be it. Can you define the paradigm? State the idea and the method?
      - Tichy 17y ago
        To me it is letting complex things emerge from simple rules (like ant paths emerging from simple behaviors of ants). The classical AI approach was more about modeling, knowledge representation, inference rules, decision trees and so on. The only thing related to NKS the classics dabbled with were neural networks. Most of them were also very restricted, though - in order to have a shot at analyzing them, the common neural networks have relatively simple structures. The idea of cellular automata is of course not from Wolfram, but he studied them to an impressive extent. To me they are just one variant of the theme, though. For me NKS is not the invention of evolutionary computation. But it portrays one part of it very well. And he argues that many things could be handled in that way, which was not obvious (I remember how he could imagine the real world to work like an cellular automaton, and still agree with quantum mechanics).
        slackenerny 17y ago
        We started from me claimimg that the subject is not fascinating, by which I understood "interesting scientifically" and not aesthetically or philosophically pleasant. This is a point independent from gauging NKS content itself. You still haven't said what is the scientifical idea. Because I for one don't know. John McCarthy doesn't too, he once hoped to gain such knowledge by careful study, and later remarked regarding Wolfram "In the 1950s I thought that the smallest possible (symbol-state product) universal Turing machine would tell something about the nature of computation. Unfortunately, it didn’t. Instead as simpler universal machines were discovered, the proofs that they were universal became more elaborate, and [so] did the encodings of information." how he could imagine the real world to work like an cellular automaton, and still agree with quantum mechanics Oh, and he got that wrong too... (by the so called No Hidden Variables theorem).

mikedouglas 17y ago

Since when has Hacker News, with its highly entrepreneurial core, ever so viciously attacked publicity? I haven't read NKS, so maybe I don't understand the depths of this man's capital offense, but I see nothing in your list that any smart business won't do. Maybe it isn't revolutionary (whatever that means), but it's a damn cool project that's going to be useful to a lot of people, and isn't that all we care about? Isn't it because the revolutionary product/idea cannot win followers and reputation solely on its merits? If the odds are worse without promotion, what rational human wouldn't use it?

wheels 17y ago
Since when has Hacker News, with its highly entrepreneurial core, ever so viciously attacked publicity? I believe the last time was Cuil. Being able to work the hype machine is great, but if you generate more hype than you can deliver on it hurts your image. Since A New Kind of Science was similarly underwhelming, not to mention even more pretentiously hyped, many are cynical.
- mikedouglas 17y ago
  I believe the last time was Cuil. Cuil's sin was failing at a solved problem, and most plainly, trying to be a "Google killer" (I believe they lectured Google on the size of their search database before they even launched). NLP answer engines aren't a solved problem, and WA was a pretty decent 1.0. Sure it failed techcrunch's vanity test, but for what Wolfram promised in those videos, it performs.
  - wheels 17y ago
    I think what you're saying is true, but it's orthogonal to my point. Both of them generated more hype than they delivered on in their launches and people were underwhelmed. That WA has more promise is a separate matter.
    - slackenerny 17y ago
      It is interesting to parallel Wolfram with Thinking Machines founders. It is a rather little known fact that, trained through TM catastrophe, its founders went on to form a stealth company, called Ab Initio, which is wildly successful despite having no marketing. Indeed they're actively avoiding it through NDA contracts to the point that general public doesn't exactly know what exactly their products do. I am not ridiculing Wolfram, just wanted to point that above is as an interesting anecdote.

huhtenberg 17y ago

> Wolfram's talent for self-promotion has been nicely demonstrated by the publicity campaign ahead of his WolframAlpha launch. What makes you think it was Wolfram's talent per se and not that of some marketing exec ?