This video is insane. If Alpha can do the stuff in this video, it's a revolutionary upgrade to human thought.
I don't think I'm exaggerating. Making this available to the world for free will probably make as much of a difference to human thought and progress as Google has, if not more.
My worry is that this stuff was cherry-picked. Also, like Google (at least at first), this is going to be most useful to the people who think like the creators. I remember when Google appeared, some people (me, f'r instance) were able to get great results nearly every time, and other people seemed not to get the results they were looking for even after repeated attempts to refine the search. This effect lessened after a while, but Wolfram Alpha appears to have it in spades. I mean, "What is the GDP of France / Italy" clearly means to display a comparison of the GDPs of France and Italy, not to do some division producing a result that doesn't seem to have any relevance to anything... :)
I agree. I don't see how it could work so nicely for everything. Though it seems that he picked a specific category (Mathematica) which helps quite a lot on what to do with the query.
Take the example with the first names: "Andrew", then "Andrew John" (or whatever it was) which compares the two names over the years. What happens if I type "Elton John" now?
The screencast was impressive but I'd like to try it by myself (which should be soon apparently) to realize how powerful it can be.
That everpresent "Mathematica" blurb on the screens doesn't represent any kind of site category, I don't think; the whole site is driven by Mathematica behind the scenes. The Mathematica link often visible looks like it goes to some sort of representation of that behind-the-scenes stuff, but that's just a guess.
Oh ok, thanks for the info. Since I saw a big list of categories at the end of the screencast and remembered that "Mathematica" was there all along, I figured there was something to it. I just have a hard time believing that that kind of results can be achieved without more information than the keywords.
If it does the computations demonstrated for even the limited range of data indicated in the UI, it represents an overwhelming advance in search. Even if they have to slowly, manually add new data as they go along.
Think of it as a Wikipedia you can compute on. It will grow nicely.
Compare this to the pile of information in Freebase. Pretty nice they've already linked relevant data for you, and can compute on relations.
Actually, the finance category seemed like less of an advance than much of the other stuff. Google and Yahoo produce charts and comparisons like this already, as far as I can see.
Which I think is a pretty good label, actually. It is taking all the kind of information found in the big reference books in your library (atlases, dictionaries, science reference, etc.) and making it searchable through queries and inferences and calculations.
I agree that the people comparing it to Google are off the mark. This demo does not compare it to Google in any way. I like at the end they show a page with the kinds of things Alpha knows about. It would be very frustrating trying to guess what it knows or not by typing in random queries.
The way it is understanding and interpreting the queries I find amazing. Seems like a big step in AI (to the public at least).
The results are equally interesting, i hope it can live up to the hype.
To my fellow beta-testers (I'm sure some of you are here): have any of you found an actual productive use for Alpha? Scratch that, has anyone here used it "in anger", even once? I've been trying, so far, to no avail. (I have a copy of Mathematica, so use cases which intersect with that app's existing features are not of interest to me.)
I'm not a beta user, but offhand I would use it in my daily research to compare nations and economies, fact check articles on the economy, weather, etc. To contextualize, compare and analyze random factoids I come across daily but don't really understand.
This is incredible if it's built on New Kind of Science (game of life, etc - see Hackers by Steven Levy), but if it's just entered by hand, then it's merely useful.
One thing I can forgive is that you have to learn what you can do, you can't just sit down and use it. You need to read the manual.
I also totally dug his English accent, except for the term 'math' which show's he's mostly American. ;-)
This is incredible. What I'd really like to see is something like this hooked up to a top quality voice recognition system and voice synthesis. So when I'm driving, or walking down the street, or working at my whiteboard, or whatever, I can answer those dumb little questions that always pop into my head.
I don't think I'm exaggerating. Making this available to the world for free will probably make as much of a difference to human thought and progress as Google has, if not more.