8 ms·

An inside look at Stephen Wolfram's computational paradigm

75 points by codelion 13y ago

chm 13y ago
Bravo, but I have one question: What exactly is the "utterly new, insanely ambitious computational paradigm"?
- drakaal 13y ago
  The ability to create insane queries that leverage multiple data sets seamlessly and provide a visualization. I gave some examples in my comment.
  - chm 13y ago
    Well, this is technically very difficult. I don't see how it is a new "paradigm" though. It's just a next step in the same direction technology has been heading, no?
    - judk 13y ago
      It's _A New Kind of Search-Engine_
drakaal 13y ago
I am really excited about this. Combining their API with the NLP stuff we are building cool things would be even simpler. Our engine turns things like "How many people are living in China right now" in to { "action": "query", "project": [ "population" ], "model": "geopolitics", "payload": { "country_code": "CN" } } We can do more complex things, but I figure pasting huge code examples in to HN is frowned upon. Combining our ability to create structured queries with Wolfram's ability to do amazing visualizations could result in some amazing things. We are looking at basically having the Star Trek computer in terms of being able to say. "How many times more men live in China than in the US" and have our data create a query that Wolfram would visualize by taking the number of men in china and dividing by the number of men in the United States. Or taking it a step further... "let me know" our version of "If this then that" could be really impressive with this kind of data. "Let me know if there is rain anywhere on my route from San Diego to San Francisco Tomorrow" We have already started to do some of this at http://plexivoice.com http://plexivoice.com but ties to Wolfram will make it even more surreal.
- tree_of_item 13y ago
  If it's not too much trouble, could you put some of these huge code examples in a blog post or something? I get the sense that a lot of people (myself included) are still a little confused as to what "Wolfram Language" is exactly, and maybe some code from someone who sees value in it would help clarify things.
  - calcsam 13y ago
    Count me in this bucket...
  - faceyspacey 13y ago
    i bet it's dope, but I bet it's not "it".
  - drakaal 13y ago
    I will get a blog post up soon, and will update this thread. I think part of the problem is Wolfram named it poorly. Think "Ultimate Mashup Tool with a relatively easy interface for building the mashups" I'm excited because with my NLP stuff it can be "Mashups built with your voice" or "Mashups your Grandma can build"
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
Mithaldu 13y ago
"Use NLP to convert questions into code, which can not only retrieve data, but also do parametrized computation on it." This sounds to me to be the core here, simplified as far as possible. Quite an undertaking, but if it gets rolling properly, it can actually end up challenging Google. Imagine being able to ask the following question and get an answer with summary and graph and maybe options to drill down, all computed in response to the question, not pregenerated: "How many people were living in China from 1950 to 1980?" (Or don't imagine and just click: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+many+people+were+living+in+China+from+1950+to+1980%3F http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+many+people+were+li... )
- 3pt14159 13y ago
  Eh... I upvoted you for weeding through the bullshit, but it is still bullshit. People shouldn't aggrandize like this. They should let the work speak for itself.
  - yeukhon 13y ago
    You don't get it. For any casual browsing a graph means nothing. But for people putting a powerpoint together or doing hw or doing research this graph is useful. Imagine you get a comparison chart from your query (Google already does this for very very very limited comparison queries). If you get the raw data out of Wolframalpha that's even better. Instead of having a data scientist to write code to get the graph or imputing this into excel or words to get a graph, let WA do it for you. Hey here is another idea for innovators: instead of screenshot a graph but don't we have a graph importer in powerpoint? We are just looking at 2D plot, there is nothing fancy about this graph but there are more fancy stuff you can build. A graph is a generic term in mathematics and I hope you know that. Why do we go through social graph and knowledge graph? Why not keep them behind a firewall? Why bother building a JS interpreter in Go? If you can build a machine that can compute anything (universal turning machine, well, I know there are NP problems but we can do our best to compute a subset of the computable - approximation), you can do a lot of crazy things. I think WA is nailing down how the future of computing in relation to life is going to be. Ask a question and gives you back the data to you in both representational and raw form. Here are examples: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Who+is+Mozilla%3F http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Who+is+Mozilla%3F http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Who+is+https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%3F http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Who+is+https%3A%2F%2Fne... If somehow we can contribute to WA's modules (we write our custom programs and WA can adopt them by means of marketplace - select to use this module, for example), then we can utilize WA powerful machinery to do our query and benefit the mass. This is where Open Source can make a big difference! Sure APIs are nice but you know, not everyone has time to manage another new website. If we can get paid to write modules and get commission share based on the number of users ... So on top of API, direct module marketplace IMHO is the game changing. This is why I like Google App Script and App Engine. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Who+is+Facebook%3F http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Who+is+Facebook%3F
enupten 13y ago
Wouldn't this be bad reproducibility wise ? I mean, the language spec is essentially changing on a rolling basis.
snowwrestler 13y ago
The problem with covering claims of changing paradigms is: who is qualified to evaluate such ambitious claims? Realistically, not many folks. I think the best thing for a reporter to do is to connect the appropriate experts together to build a balanced story. Yes, spend time with Wolfram, take good notes etc.--but then find the right experts to respond to and evaluate what he said. To me, this story reads a bit too credulous to be really useful in understanding what Wolfram is claiming. I read Wolfram's blog post already, and this story seems about the same in tone and content. What I want to see is the equivalant of this [1] article: a cranky review by an expert in the field...with citations. [1] http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfra...
- Houshalter 13y ago
  Isn't that what hacker news comments are for?
  - wrongc0ntinent 13y ago
    Wolfram is a master at this game. You can't deny the brilliant stuff he's done; throw in new terminology for unoriginal concepts, and it becomes very hard to call a bluff (or a delusion). Edit: or confirm.
- nl 13y ago
  WolframAlpha (the current site/service) is pretty impressive as it stands now. It's good enough that I did the first few Project Euler[1] puzzles on it, and given that it isn't really a programming tool I think that's a decent demonstration. I'd be inclined to believe he has something new, that really can do things that are difficult with other tools. Whether or not it is useful is another question. [1] http://projecteuler.net/ http://projecteuler.net/
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
Sidebar: Argh. I've played with alpha several times and each time gave up in frustration. Just now I wanted to know "What's the history of the closing price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in ounces of gold over the last 50 years?" Spent 15 minutes fooling around. Finally got the pricing data in working separate queries, but couldn't combine it. So I asked to download the files -- only to be bugged to sign up. Must be a totally awesome system. I can't make heads or tails of it. Meh.
- nabla9 13y ago
  Was your intention to compare gold and DOW as investments for long term? In that case you should ask question: "What is the price of Dow Jones Industrial Average dividends reinvested in ounces of gold?" In long term, the majority of value in stock markets comes from dividends. That does not show in stock price graphs.
  - DanielBMarkham 13y ago
    No. I wanted to see how the stock market change would look if, instead of being priced in dollars, it was priced in some form of commodity, like gold. So if one day the index closed at 1000, and gold was 200/ounce, it would have closed at 5 ounces. Thanks for the help, though.
    - marvin 13y ago
      If not even nabla9 can understand what you were really asking, it shouldn't come as a surprise that an NLP program couldn't ;)
Keyframe 13y ago
Judging by past wolfram hypes, I don't have any confidence in this at all to be even a moderate success. I wish it would be true though, but we know it won't happen. PR/BS ratio is high.
sbierwagen 13y ago
Hrm.
hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
It's hard to figure out what the article is about underneath all the hype coating.

75 points by codelion 13y ago

chm 13y ago

Bravo, but I have one question: What exactly is the "utterly new, insanely ambitious computational paradigm"?

drakaal 13y ago
The ability to create insane queries that leverage multiple data sets seamlessly and provide a visualization. I gave some examples in my comment.
- chm 13y ago
  Well, this is technically very difficult. I don't see how it is a new "paradigm" though. It's just a next step in the same direction technology has been heading, no?
  - judk 13y ago
    It's _A New Kind of Search-Engine_

drakaal 13y ago

I am really excited about this. Combining their API with the NLP stuff we are building cool things would be even simpler. Our engine turns things like "How many people are living in China right now" in to { "action": "query", "project": [ "population" ], "model": "geopolitics", "payload": { "country_code": "CN" } } We can do more complex things, but I figure pasting huge code examples in to HN is frowned upon. Combining our ability to create structured queries with Wolfram's ability to do amazing visualizations could result in some amazing things. We are looking at basically having the Star Trek computer in terms of being able to say. "How many times more men live in China than in the US" and have our data create a query that Wolfram would visualize by taking the number of men in china and dividing by the number of men in the United States. Or taking it a step further... "let me know" our version of "If this then that" could be really impressive with this kind of data. "Let me know if there is rain anywhere on my route from San Diego to San Francisco Tomorrow" We have already started to do some of this at http://plexivoice.com http://plexivoice.com but ties to Wolfram will make it even more surreal.

tree_of_item 13y ago
If it's not too much trouble, could you put some of these huge code examples in a blog post or something? I get the sense that a lot of people (myself included) are still a little confused as to what "Wolfram Language" is exactly, and maybe some code from someone who sees value in it would help clarify things.
- calcsam 13y ago
  Count me in this bucket...
- faceyspacey 13y ago
  i bet it's dope, but I bet it's not "it".
- drakaal 13y ago
  I will get a blog post up soon, and will update this thread. I think part of the problem is Wolfram named it poorly. Think "Ultimate Mashup Tool with a relatively easy interface for building the mashups" I'm excited because with my NLP stuff it can be "Mashups built with your voice" or "Mashups your Grandma can build"
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

Mithaldu 13y ago

"Use NLP to convert questions into code, which can not only retrieve data, but also do parametrized computation on it." This sounds to me to be the core here, simplified as far as possible. Quite an undertaking, but if it gets rolling properly, it can actually end up challenging Google. Imagine being able to ask the following question and get an answer with summary and graph and maybe options to drill down, all computed in response to the question, not pregenerated: "How many people were living in China from 1950 to 1980?" (Or don't imagine and just click: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+many+people+were+living+in+China+from+1950+to+1980%3F http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+many+people+were+li... )

3pt14159 13y ago
Eh... I upvoted you for weeding through the bullshit, but it is still bullshit. People shouldn't aggrandize like this. They should let the work speak for itself.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  You don't get it. For any casual browsing a graph means nothing. But for people putting a powerpoint together or doing hw or doing research this graph is useful. Imagine you get a comparison chart from your query (Google already does this for very very very limited comparison queries). If you get the raw data out of Wolframalpha that's even better. Instead of having a data scientist to write code to get the graph or imputing this into excel or words to get a graph, let WA do it for you. Hey here is another idea for innovators: instead of screenshot a graph but don't we have a graph importer in powerpoint? We are just looking at 2D plot, there is nothing fancy about this graph but there are more fancy stuff you can build. A graph is a generic term in mathematics and I hope you know that. Why do we go through social graph and knowledge graph? Why not keep them behind a firewall? Why bother building a JS interpreter in Go? If you can build a machine that can compute anything (universal turning machine, well, I know there are NP problems but we can do our best to compute a subset of the computable - approximation), you can do a lot of crazy things. I think WA is nailing down how the future of computing in relation to life is going to be. Ask a question and gives you back the data to you in both representational and raw form. Here are examples: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Who+is+Mozilla%3F http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Who+is+Mozilla%3F http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Who+is+https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%3F http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Who+is+https%3A%2F%2Fne... If somehow we can contribute to WA's modules (we write our custom programs and WA can adopt them by means of marketplace - select to use this module, for example), then we can utilize WA powerful machinery to do our query and benefit the mass. This is where Open Source can make a big difference! Sure APIs are nice but you know, not everyone has time to manage another new website. If we can get paid to write modules and get commission share based on the number of users ... So on top of API, direct module marketplace IMHO is the game changing. This is why I like Google App Script and App Engine. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Who+is+Facebook%3F http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Who+is+Facebook%3F

enupten 13y ago

Wouldn't this be bad reproducibility wise ? I mean, the language spec is essentially changing on a rolling basis.

snowwrestler 13y ago

The problem with covering claims of changing paradigms is: who is qualified to evaluate such ambitious claims? Realistically, not many folks. I think the best thing for a reporter to do is to connect the appropriate experts together to build a balanced story. Yes, spend time with Wolfram, take good notes etc.--but then find the right experts to respond to and evaluate what he said. To me, this story reads a bit too credulous to be really useful in understanding what Wolfram is claiming. I read Wolfram's blog post already, and this story seems about the same in tone and content. What I want to see is the equivalant of this [1] article: a cranky review by an expert in the field...with citations. [1] http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfra...

Houshalter 13y ago
Isn't that what hacker news comments are for?
- wrongc0ntinent 13y ago
  Wolfram is a master at this game. You can't deny the brilliant stuff he's done; throw in new terminology for unoriginal concepts, and it becomes very hard to call a bluff (or a delusion). Edit: or confirm.
nl 13y ago
WolframAlpha (the current site/service) is pretty impressive as it stands now. It's good enough that I did the first few Project Euler[1] puzzles on it, and given that it isn't really a programming tool I think that's a decent demonstration. I'd be inclined to believe he has something new, that really can do things that are difficult with other tools. Whether or not it is useful is another question. [1] http://projecteuler.net/ http://projecteuler.net/

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

Sidebar: Argh. I've played with alpha several times and each time gave up in frustration. Just now I wanted to know "What's the history of the closing price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in ounces of gold over the last 50 years?" Spent 15 minutes fooling around. Finally got the pricing data in working separate queries, but couldn't combine it. So I asked to download the files -- only to be bugged to sign up. Must be a totally awesome system. I can't make heads or tails of it. Meh.

nabla9 13y ago
Was your intention to compare gold and DOW as investments for long term? In that case you should ask question: "What is the price of Dow Jones Industrial Average dividends reinvested in ounces of gold?" In long term, the majority of value in stock markets comes from dividends. That does not show in stock price graphs.
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  No. I wanted to see how the stock market change would look if, instead of being priced in dollars, it was priced in some form of commodity, like gold. So if one day the index closed at 1000, and gold was 200/ounce, it would have closed at 5 ounces. Thanks for the help, though.
  - marvin 13y ago
    If not even nabla9 can understand what you were really asking, it shouldn't come as a surprise that an NLP program couldn't ;)

Keyframe 13y ago

Judging by past wolfram hypes, I don't have any confidence in this at all to be even a moderate success. I wish it would be true though, but we know it won't happen. PR/BS ratio is high.

sbierwagen 13y ago

Hrm.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago

It's hard to figure out what the article is about underneath all the hype coating.