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Merged Wolfram Alpha

jimtron

Illuminator
jimtron
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Google challenger? Sounds cool.

From The Independent:

The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet's Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.
Although the system is still new, it has already produced massive interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet watchers.
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he real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out "on the fly", according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in "10 flips for four heads" and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.Dr Wolfram, an award-winning physicist who is based in America, added that the information is "curated", meaning it is assessed first by experts. This means that the weaknesses of sites such as Wikipedia, where doubts are cast on the information because anyone can contribute, are taken out. It is based on his best-selling Mathematica software, a standard tool for scientists, engineers and academics for crunching complex maths.
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jimtron said:
Sounds cool.
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But not Cuil. Let's see how it goes! My idea of the ultimate search engine would let me put a picture in or let me hum a tune and throw out correct results.
I don't know if I like the idea of information being curated though.
 
I'd have to agree with AgeGap in that I don't like the idea of all that information being curated.

I'm also not so fond of some of the ideas floated in the article. For example there were suggestions of their incorporating A.I. to produce a self-organizing internet. I don't know if that's such a good idea.


INRM
 
AgeGap said:
But not Cuil. Let's see how it goes! My idea of the ultimate search engine would let me put a picture in or let me hum a tune and throw out correct results.
I don't know if I like the idea of information being curated though.
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tineye.com is a reverse picture searcher. Feed it a link to an online pic, or upload one, and it will show you all the other copies, of any resolution, it knows, as well as other, similar pictures (such as photoshoot sets.)

In theory sounds good, but it's a bit touchy at the moment. Needs to be hooked to a gigantic search engine like Google to really build the critical mass of pictures it needs.




And I never was sure what the heck cuil was supposed to do. Presumably do better at sorting out crap, bogus sites in favor of ones more likely to actually be what you're looking for.

But then I thought that was what that patented algorithm did where the search engine monitored which links users actually clicked for each search term, and then pushed those towards the top of the list. Ideally, your list would be the ranked pages people clicked for that search term.

Was that Jeeves or something? Do they still have that patent?
 
INRM said:
Soapy Sam,

So what if I don't have faith?


INRM
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It's something you just feel.
It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together
 
Here is an article written by someone who actually tried Wolfram Alpha for 2 hours.

He is impressed but also gives examples of what Alpha can't do.

It still looks cool, but it is not HAL 9000 (yet...).
 
Seren,

Good article...

For the Record: I don't think it would be a good idea to have an "intelligent" self organizing internet...
 
Doesn't know what to do with my input. Using search strings that would produce thousands of hits with Google. That gets old real quick.
 
boooeee,

The name Wolfram Alpha is most likely based on the name Memory Alpha which was in Star Trek...


INRM
 
Dymanic said:
Doesn't know what to do with my input. Using search strings that would produce thousands of hits with Google. That gets old real quick.
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I just tried to use it to find some statistics for a thread here (car accident mortality rates versus the rates for planes) - abysmal failure!
 
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