OnPoint by Keith Ng

Interesting website... except that it thinks Kiwi only refers to fruit.

I'll come back when it's ready a few more books...

(BTW - at least it knows the meaning of life...)

Bookmarked immediately.You have to applaud the idea. The sun set at 7.07 p.m on the day I was born don't you know.

At least it's got some Easter Eggs

The sun set at 7.07 p.m on the day I was born don't you know.

Umm. Doesn't that actually depend on where you were born ? Since W|A doesn't know where you were born it cannot have provided the right answer. It's answer was kinda incomplete - it didn't say where the sun set at 7:07pm.

I had a play and found it very frustrating. For example "area country Europe", it doesn't understand, although "area country" gives areas of countries, and "country Europe" lists the countries in Europe. Moreover "largest area country Europe" lists the 5 countries in Europe with the largest areas. BUT (and its a big but), "smallest area country Europe" gives an answer of "Lammefjord,-7 m (Denmark)" which it claims is the lowest point in Europe. However, W|A knows that the shore of the Caspian Sea is 28m below mean sea level, which you can find out if you use "Europe with Russia" or "Europe with Turkey and Russia". Presumably this is because the underlying categorisation is unable to split a country between two continents.

= FAIL.

On the bright side, Alpha works as pretty awesome statistics calculator. It’s basically the Mathematica suite as an online tool,

That's what I thought interesting. I can see it having more benefit further down the line but then again it could be my fascination with mathematica.

it didn't say where the sun set at 7:07pm.

Yeh, it did. It picked up I was born in the supercity.

It’s a knowledge base for machines. And it’s a really important building block to allow machines to understand things about the real world. This would, in turn and in time, allow us to understanding more things about the world.

Viral marketing. Sounds like skynet. It'll become self-aware just in time for the release of the latest Terminator movie, mark my words.

A lot of people's FAILs of WA are based on the idea that it should be able to understand us. That a computer should be able to understand English and NLP.

What about us learning to understand the machine? Getting better feedback from the machine?

This is one of WA's advantages: it tells us its assumptions and interpretations. Google just takes you straight to something you don't want, and we have to do the filtering.

Heh: http://www80.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.21+gigawatts

In theory, you should be able to ask a computer about global warming, and it will find that it is caused by greenhouse gases,

Sigh...
If it did I would suggest that you re-boot and if it still gives you that answer you should re-format your hard drive and install an operating system that doesn't rely on The Herald for answers.
Global warming is caused by the sun. End of story.

Global warming is caused by the sun. End of story.

Nah, that's just the beginning of the story, global warming is caused by the sun interacting with a few other things, a major one being the composition of the earth's atmosphere. More greenhouse gases equals more warming for a given amount of energy output from the sun.

What about us learning to understand the machine? Getting better feedback from the machine?

Machines are basically cheap and getting cheaper; people are expensive.

(Quite aside from all the moral Taylorism issues and suchlike.)

global warming is caused by the sun interacting with a few other things, a major one being the composition of the earth's atmosphere.

Even Bigger SIGH...
The major one being the GLOBE.
Now, if you were refering to atmospheric warming i would agree but considering that the mass of the Earth is 5.9742x10^24 kg and the mass of its atmosphere is 5.1441x10^18 kg then, well... need I say more?

But. Back on point, as it were.
I doubt if any of us are surprised by the premise of Keith's article, do we remember the Wok/ Freeview story in T' Erald. Geeez. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the tech ed at T' Erald thought Wolfram Alpha was a space station but the rest of the tech world were,l largely, at a loss to know what Alpha really was. Much as Stephen Wolfram is a wonderfully badly dressed brain on legs (as God intended scientist to be) I think he is still barking up the wrong tree in regards to his curated database concept. As what he has done with financial and meteorological data, live analysis, could be done at a tier above the database to evaluate data sources and, eventually, eliminate the need for human curation and that would be, well, quite interesting to watch.

a crack team of hot-shit robot librarians...the library is full of porn

Hey, that sounds like my sort of library!

On the bright side, Alpha works as pretty awesome statistics calculator.

And the provision of data as data, as well as the ability to chart it and calculate with it, is what makes potentially so much more useful for certain tasks than search engines. Who cares if it doesn't know that a kiwi is a bird, or that Hitler was a vegetarian, or that Knowlegde Bro is Ian Wishart in disguise? That's what search engines are for: it's the combination of numerical data and semantic links that makes Alpha potentially valuable.

I use the word "potentially" a couple of times there, because in my brief exploration it doesn't seem to be quite there. For instance, it's great to be able to calculate the difference in population between two cities, or see a graph of air pressure at Christchurch airport, but I couldn't for the life of me work out how to graph the pressure difference between cities. That's exactly the sort of thing that one would expect to be able to do (and while it might not sound like it, it is actually useful to do that), and unless it's my failure to work around the NLP it's a bit of a let down.

I need to go and explore a bit more.

Interesting website... except that it thinks Kiwi only refers to fruit.

It does a lot better with Apteryx

The online media and discussions about Wolfram Alpha remind me a lot of my first experience with an internet search engine c. 1996. A guy whose name I don't recall raved about how amazing Webcrawler was, but it didn't come up with anything useful about any of the terms I suggested searching - I was completely underwhelmed.

Jump forward a few years and the internet and Google are nearly essential parts of daily life. Will be fascinating to see what future iterations of WA might capable of in about a decade...

Treating Alpha as just an answer box (from Associated Press. FACEPALM.) misses the point entirely. It’s not a knowledge base for humans.

That may be so, but they're certainly dying for humans to access it. I've been on the mailing list for a while and the very strong implication of their promotion has always been that it would revolutionise access to knowledge on the Web. You create that expectation, and then launch a product that in its current incarnation is good at telling you nothing at all, you might get some bad reviews. Fair cop.

Will be fascinating to see what future iterations of WA might capable of in about a decade...

Dare I say it, be careful what you wish for...

Yrs
The Monkey's Paw

My favourite part of the FAQ is:

It can only know things that are known

Damn! And here I was hoping that it would prove the Riemann hypothesis, tell us what happens after death and identify the current location of Lord Lucan. But anyway, no-one tell Donald Rumsfeld.

Lord Lucan

His Lordship is in Marton

Knowlegde Bro is Ian Wishart in disguise?

Ouch!

And global thermonuclear war isn't a fight between heavily-armed spheroids. I think if everyone understands a convenient phrase to mean something sensible, complaining that it should mean something silly is fairly pointless.

A few tweaks and it'll be just the thing for maths homework. It needs to show working and have the ability to parse narrative problems.

So someone wanted to know the volume of an octagonal prism with stated dimensions. Wolfram Alpha understands "volume of an octagonal prism" and gives you the formula, but DOESN'T understand when you then give it the dimensions, using it's own formulas nomenclature.
I would have kinda thought that was the point? Or am I just using incorrect syntax?

Ahh, just worked out the syntax. As you were.