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Tomorrow we’ll be starting to launch Wolfram|Alpha. But today (May 14, 2009) is the seventh anniversary of the publication of Stephen Wolfram’s book A New Kind of Science.
It’s a curious—and unintentional—juxtaposition. Because in a sense NKS is the intellectual structure that’s now making Wolfram|Alpha possible. And Wolfram|Alpha is the first “killer app” of NKS.
Stephen Wolfram has written a blog today that reports on the state of NKS and explains a little bit of that connection.
I would like the next killer app to be computer moderated counselling. The main problem at present is that people have fixed ideas which they are unable to modify because they are in their subconcious. This means that when they attempt to reconsider them the content of the memory includes unpleasantness from which they recoil. The cure is for a counsellor to get the person to find such a fixed idea which in a safe environment with the Counsellor they can face up to and reevaluate it. The Counsellor then identifies a more difficult fixed idea, previously unfaceable, and does the same. The process gets faster and faster until all fixed ideas are dissolved and we have a person fully amenable to reason. The Counsellor needs qualities which are too great to ask at present but a computer wellprogrammed could do it. Wolfram Alpha might be the tipping point. The feed back is via a skin resistance meter which can indicate the next idea to be handled.
Well consider also “not only one person who decide for the next actions behind mystery”, all the data might be noisy and might even have contradictions inside. If you put logic it works, but if you put all human factors fed by fear than nothing might work properly. Because they will be biased. It always word to try as long as the data trusty.
I find that to be a fascinating idea. I suggest you fully fixate yourself onto it, don’t let anyone tell you it cant be done. ^_^
En espera del nuevo buscador.. para ver que sorpresas nos trae 😀
Estoy seguro que si este sitio funciona de la manera en que lo están publicitando, marcará un parteaguas en el conocimiento humano y en la forma en que las sociedades funcionan….. adelante.
Tomorrow in which time zone?
Here it are only 45 min until tomorrow…
They said “We’ll start webcasting our preparations at 7pm CDT (UTC -5). “
” We’ll be making our first attempt to go live with Wolfram|Alpha this Friday evening, May 15. We’ll start webcasting our preparations at 7pm CDT (UTC -5) ” …i belive in Europe will be in the night between Friday and Saturday,about 2 or 3 A.M. I am sure i will not fall asleep !!! :)) I will say: Present !!!
More info in the blog post on 12 may,read it!
wow! work on a theory of everthing..i hope you find it soon. and i hope you also stumble upon some sort of “consiousness” computation rule, that’ll be crazy! Keep up the hard work! keep me updated. I bought the NKS already but let me know how can I participate on the project…at least as an spectator.
Congratulations to Stephen, NKS, Alpha, and everyone involved. You have made some most interesting moves in the real game of life 🙂 BG
Byegoogle.com AHAHA
this will we the biggest invent on web pages
This is going to be big! Suprised there is not more talk going on about it.
I always believed every problem has a simple answer, and NKS with astonishing applications proofs how chaos can have simple answers. Alpha is the most astonishing one that has very big potentials. Think about it if you can feed mathematical models on powerful Mathematica grids with enough data, you can create your own chaos and come up with predictions. Predictions are the most important profit of those application. As Wolfram says, and everyone will agree, what if all those math models [in a way] combined and emerge to new models. I would definitely would be part of it.
Thanks to Stephen and all the participants who contribute to Alpha directly or indirectly.
Best Regards
Hayri
can W|A think for itself?, could it in future think of what i need (or think) i need to know
Team Wolfram, all the best from Silicon Valley! You are GO for launch!
What the world at present most needs is a money supply geared to necessary sales at full employment of all working age adults. Stock-keeping unit and supply chain data, together with population maps would be a beginning that computed target prices and all the financial accounts that were replacing current accounts (based on debt, instead of money (defined by functional finance). This would be a killer app if we were to apply purpose ahead of rules–and that purpose reflected a future less morbid than the past. If Turing were alive I am sure he would be thrilled with your work. And he might agree if we would pay in full to make real the Second Bill of Rights of 11 January 1944, we would have a chance to skip any replay of the 20th Century.
按照这个计算，æ£å¼ä¸Šçº¿åœ¨ä¸å›½è¦ç‰åˆ°æ˜Žå¤©ï¼ˆ16å·ï¼‰æ—©ä¸Šå…«ç‚¹äº†
We like the name, don’t change it as it is unique and outstanding.
why not put a countdown counter so i will not have to come see everyday to know if its started…. ?
Please express the countdown as hours and minutes to start of webcast. Then it does not matter what the viewer’s local time is?
I was just thinking about the same. But a little countdown on the webpage… would be cool.
Estamos esperando por estos lados, Chile, en el culo del mundo, un paÃs pequeño pero muy informatizado, éxito.
un antroniano paso por aquÃ
“la información es poder y los nuevos dioses lo saben”
sabrán usar esta nueva herramienta
Who or what do you want to “kill”? Shouting out loud before results are made public is just showing off..
Sorry but this reminds me of the Launch of Dean Kamen’s Segway. I Believe “IT” will be A google more successful!
This is The Beginning Of the TRON age! Quote Me. AbdulWahid Muhammad
what will be the Start time in Europe (Berlin) ? Kiedy dokladnie startujecie w Europie ? Where do I find your official badge for my website ?
regards,
Chris
I like the name “Wolfram Alpha” quite a lot – Wolfram Research is an outstanding company that produces very high quality software. Please don’t cave to some of the folks who want you to give it a cutesy web-2.0 name.
A counter would be nice. It will be very interesting to see the uses of W|A applied to education. Can’t wait…
It’s 1:32 my time, Pacific Standard Time, and I just finished viewing the demo. Super Amazing (hope they have super servers too) and delightful. What I want to know, is how the Romulans could have mistaken the time sequence of the event for which the bad guy blamed Spock (just saw the movie). Like – what *really* comes before, and what after? Everybody needs to know that, about everything. Then we could understand things correctly and not have to go back in time to make modifications while also trying to prevent warps in the matrix. Right.
We’re going to be so smart.
I can’t wait to try W | A.. I have many Questions that need to be answered
I don’t see W|A as killer ap of NKS. At the core of W|A are lots of data gathered by measurements and pretty basic mathematical computation.
I can see you can claim that more complex output is than input was. But measurements are complex thing itself, every measurement have intrinsic error, even if W|A doesn’t acknowledge it. And math needed for computation was known long before NKS. There sure are build-in new programming tricks for recognizing input language and algorithms for computing on supercomputer also, but that science is not really part of NKS, is it?
I see W|A as great book of real world data and knowledge that can be presented more informative than ever before. I hope Wolfram team will build on that.
Mashable had a skeptical post, claiming that any questions your software answers can also be handled by a Google search.
http://mashable.com/2009/05/14/semantic-web/
I thought you might be interested in my comment:
Suppose I want this information for a paper I’m writing:
What is the dollar figure of tomato imports into the U.S. during the winter months, by exporting country and by year, for the last 10 years?
I wrote such a paper when I was in college, and had a hell of a time getting any numbers. There was no internet then. There were books in the government documents section of the library that had the data, but some of them were either mis-shelved or checked out. Also, the government had changed accounting years in the middle of the time span, leaving an orphaned three-month period, with no way to extrapolate backwards for forward. I had to go with five years of data, instead of ten years.
I don’t know if WolframAlpha can answer that question now, but it or something like it will, someday. It just has to happen, and it will revolutionize the study of social problems and potential solutions.
Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com
Players who re-define the existing landscape are most welcome, with millions of users logging on to new technology services, it is an apt environment for some one like wolframalpha.com present new features.
Keep up the good work !
Ramana Pemmaraju, Technology Analyst
i just cant wait to ask….. good luck to team wolfram & may the force be with you 😉
Wolfram|Alpha’yı Türk’ler kullandığı anda zayıf düşecektir. Türkler düşünülmediÄŸi sürece yazılan hiçbir web uygulaması yaygınlaÅŸmış sayılmaz 🙂
Hope It will the best 🙂
Thanks.
This will surely change the way people will do research. Kudos to the whole team!
I am very curious about your attempt to challenge Google! Best wishes from Germany…
Hi,
I’m curious, but skeptical, so we’ll see.
However, there’s a typo in your note about the live webcast. “Wolram” => “Wolfram”
It appears I was either seeing things that weren’t, or it’s been fixed.
When will be Alpha available for Polish language?
Desde Buenos Aires (Argentina), esperando tener noticias del comienzo del sitio.
Creo que sera una verdadera revolucion en las busquedas para obenter informacion inteligente
resumida y procesada para utilizarla.
Exitos !!
I know why there’s no post here for the 15th yet. Your hands are shaking.
So are mine. I’m so excited.
the distance from springfield, ma to ny, ny is short by over 20 miles
are the mesurament air miles? if so who need it
we need a land distance for travel (i do not own a plane nither 9.9999 % of population)
thanks
I’ve been waiting to test this new intelligent search engine for weeks and unfortunately it will be 1am local time. Guess it will have to wait for tomorrow morning 🙂
Regards from France!
A next step could be to incorporate an universal transaltion function (all the knowledge in all language will be aviable for everyone)
I don’t know if you take requests for the types of data that you work with, but I would love to see in depth information about carbon steel. Everything from the simple data like alloy contents of different steels, to phase diagrams and Ms temperatures.
It would be awesome to be able to go to your site and type in “Ms of 1095 steel”, or “phase diagram of 1095 vs. o1 steel”.
[No website given — I have many — you can Google for my real name above and find me easily enough.]
I was delighted *AND* disappointed by NKS and expect the same here.
Prior to reading about NKS, I had been doing research since about 1991 on data compression. I had an epiphany when testing an encryption system I had developed for a Canadian Bank. One of the tests was to run trivial plain text input (the letter ‘A’ repeated a million times, say) through the algorithm and then run a battery of compression algorithms to ensure that the stream was incompressible (hence had gone from low entropy to apparent high entropy). Although not sufficient, I think it is somewhat necessary for anything but the most sophisticated of algorithms (not counting steganography, etc.) to create an incompressible stream from any input.
I realized that I had a stream that was highly incompressible via conventional means and trivially compressible via the decryption half of the algorithm. I reasoned that for at least *some* things that I call ‘streams of interest’ (human developed texts, etc) that there would be a similar transformation that would render a much higher rate of data compression than conventional means.
One of my research techniques was to create automata to exhaustively search various ‘vector translations’ to see if conversion from conventional space to the new space would yield a benefit. These were total shots in the dark and none were successful. At the same time I was doing this, I was examining the (relatively) simple mathematics governing these matters. I think initially I was simply trying to get an idea of the probable size of a ‘bit vector’ that would map algorithmically back to ‘streams of interest’.
Although the probability of transforming a random million bytes into something compressible is vanishingly small, the input streams ‘of interest’ that would be translated into a limited set of vectors is also vanishingly small compared to the possible inputs. That is, the things we care to compress are decidedly *not* random at all. Ordinary input streams, even if compressed already and subsequently encrypted are still highly ‘reachable’ through transformation whereas the vast majority of theoretically possible streams are not even reachable themselves, let alone compressible.
Like Mr. Wolfram, I also believe that relatively simple algorithms can (and do) generate much of the world’s complexity. In fact, from my research, I believe that the entirety of existence is predicated upon a single simple algorithm. I am not certain what that is, but for those who wish to take a crack at it, I will offer the following heuristics: It involves, e, i and pi. It is symmetrical, but has a mechanism whereby a feedback cycle can break symmetry. Entities arise from nothing because nothing is equal to minus ‘whatever’ added to plus ‘whatever’. Some primitive ‘thing’ must have a way of interacting with other things and one of the primary ways I am convinced they do is such that two very tenuous ‘Planck level objects’ become both the two widely dispersed entities (each of which could cease to exist in the next state change) and a combined object less likely to cease existence, occupying less space and to the extent they manifest as a wave, with a smaller (likely half) wave-length. I do not have nearly enough brain power to crack this nut because although the algorithm will be simple in the sense of being relatively small it will get complex to calculate to the level of things we know (like atoms and their components) and the various known forces.
Part of the reason I believe the above is because I have a sort of notion of ‘survival of the fittest’. The universe would take the simplest course first because it is simpler and hence more likely to arise spontaneously and operate more quickly. The simple way would out-compete more complex methods in the race to form the universe.
The reason for going into the above is to express the notion that the history of the universe may be random, but its outcomes are not. That is, randomness is not the thing that primarily governs the apparent complexity we see. Of ‘chance’ and ‘necessity’, I believe necessity completely trumps chance in terms of how things manifest themselves. There is always a chance that two liters of two mixed gases could separate and un-mix. It would violate no fundamental physical law, but it is so small a chance that its existence is moot. When judged against what random chaos would look like, the universe has a surprisingly small amount of apparent entropy. It is astonishingly simple by that measure. My first best bet for a simple outcome would be a simple mechanism to create it.
It would be wonderful to develop a canon and a method of reaching elements in that canon that would allow phenomenal data compression. This would transform computing immediately. A ten-fold increase in levels of data compression would very rapidly increase the capacity of the world’s storage, bandwidth and CPU power. It would place within reach various calculations hitherto impossible.
Something that I find even more amazing and what I really was hoping we would get with a breakthrough in NKS is the notion that since things like Mozart’s music comes from a very narrow vector space, the transformation that clusters his existing music in nearby vector space (a transformed space) would likely contain some music that he did not write, but could have. The same would hold true for medicines, families of algorithms or any other thing that human beings organize in their minds. It is a real long-shot, but there *does* exist spaces where these things exist *and* they are not as far away as a ‘random’ space would be (random ones are unreachable even in theory). They might be reachable and I feel that the probability that they *are* reachable is good. Certainly, the risk/reward ratio is enough that I have devoted a significant amount of time and money to pursuing it.
How NKS, even as a shot-gun approach helps with this is that it helps to define the reachable universe of vector spaces, helps to elucidate which might be of interest (as they map more or less to stuff we know to be interesting), helps to refine our ability to automate research *and* with luck, if we take appropriate aim, it may help us to ‘bootstrap’ our ability to do NKS more efficiently. That is, it may help us to discover heuristics that allow us to reach hitherto unreachable vector spaces — to find ‘shortcuts’ to trim the search trees.
I am skeptical that WolframAlpha will be anything but an ‘interesting’ experiment. To the extent that it brings more to the table, I am not expecting huge things. However, I am still hoping for them. If there are some semi-intelligent guts underneath this thing, I think I can come up with some fantastic questions.
I will note that during the course of my research I *did* determine that progress would require large address spaces and lots of storage and processing power. My local system for this research is a lowly AMD four-core box with 8GB of RAM. It is more than I would have dreamed of thirty four years ago, when I started my adventure with computing. Laughably, I had once predicted that we would be able to simulate human intelligence with about 1GB of RAM and 1GHz of CPU and 1TB of storage. I have more than that now and I think my system may be possibly slower and stupider sometimes than my old 8-bit Atari system with 16K of RAM. It certainly takes a lot longer to turn on.
Despite that fact that due to the math of Group Forming Networks (GFN), I realize that today’s computers have no hope of simulating human intelligence, I *do* think that it will be possible to perform something akin to magic within a couple of decades and whatever it is called, something akin to NKS will form part of the solution. There is something fundamentally broken with modern computing apparatus and I think that NKS experiments will help to show a way around it.
I used to think that the ‘novel’ was of necessity outside the realm of the known and required an essentially random search beyond the realms of the known. However, it is apparent to me that the fabric of ‘what is’ is severely constrained and even at the borders of our knowledge, the nature of the fabric does not change much. We *can* incrementally increase knowledge by systematically nibbling at the edge of the unknown. However, it must be constrained by that which is necessary to reduce the search space and unbounded by that which is not necessary to allow the novel to be discovered. This is much more difficult a problem than one might think. That which is necessary is difficult to determine and getting a random heading into an unbounded direction is much more difficult than most people imagine. Even coin flips have some bias and at the levels we are working that tiny bias might be enough to pervert the entire enterprise.
One thing that is hopeful about this WolframAlpha thing is that I believe it addresses a fundamental issue that NKS did not seem to properly address on its own. That is the issue of ‘canon’ to establish what is empirically probable. Arguably, we need to examine everything that can be digitized and sample every transformation possible, including exploring significant depths of promising transformations. This will take people a lot smarter than me and perhaps a collective (including our tools) that is smarter than any person could be.
Whatever happens here, I really like the fact that regardless of the rationale, it is at least partially exploring something that I was setting up to do myself and lacked the resources to do. I still have, until the end of this month access to many terabytes of bandwidth and storage, but I appreciate the difficulty of setting such a thing up to do useful work. I was unable to do so in the year that was available to me. I am hoping that whatever form it takes, they develop a significant ‘canon’ of material on a scale with Google. Even in its rawest form it would be a valuable resource and hopefully they will make it available to other researchers. As an intelligent distillate, it would be incredible and I (perhaps naively) think that a very significant distillate could be stored in a few terabytes — small enough for researchers to use locally.
[No website given — I have many — you can Google for my real name above and find me easily enough.]
Oops. At the time of positng my name was above. It should be above *and* below this
Hi,
Does wolfram Alpha have accurate data for the entire world(Details from All countries on all aspects)– or is mostly Just The US? Unfortunately US is a very small part of the world . FOr example if I type distance between Chenai & Madurai — Will it calculate(These are two important cities in the southern part of India.
Am asking this as the Number of internet users from Countries like India, China & many other APAC countries are increasing exponentially in comparisiobn to the US.
Best regards,
Vijay
I’m sure it will have distances. There would just have to be at least one database with the latitude and longitude of each city in question, and a simple algorithm could do the calculation.
I hope this will return power of internet to science too, not only for commercial search contents.
Before internet heavy commercialization, scientific knowledge content search was way better.
Wish you success!!!
Best Regards from Bulgaria.
Does anyone know when this application will be available for use in the USA (ie. what time on May 15th, 2009 for EST)?
You could try comparing the time you submitted the question to the time it was logged underneath your question. Hopefully, that will represent the differrence between your local time and Wolfram Alpha time. It should be a whole number of hours. Then apply that difference to 7 p.m.
I’m pretty excited! Looks like Wikipedia times a million. Isn’t technology great?
Interested to see what this will bring to the table. Good luck launching and update us with how the launch went and first steps of Alpha live!
Bob,
Wow! What a post. Even though I feel I was able to comprehend about 60% of your dissertation, you have massaged my brain. Thank you.
Perhaps WolframAlpha will be the leap, and the conduit to further leaps, most everyone has envisioned.
I’m really looking forward to test this out. All the best to Mr. Wolfram and his team, this is truly a piece of art.
~5 hours to live webcast?
Also wish you good luck, especially regarding the load you’ll have to encounter.
greets, stephan@spamschlucker.org
Sciencefiction come true!
Impressive thing.. would become I guess my favorite toy, better than video or computer games.. hope it can help 3rd world people and kids come to science and education!
Good luck
looking forward to medical and humanitarian issues…dont forget resourced limited settings
Felipe
Guys come on now – this is purely PR BS. NKS is cool but alpha’s got little to do with it. Read it cover to cover.
The Wolfram Alpha Blog Page
https://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/15/live-from-champaign/
refuses to show the comments. It links to the webcast which is no longer active.
Hi Brian,
We updated the blog link to the archive of the video last night (or, more precisely early this morning). Please refresh you browser and see if that works for you. The blog comments should appear under the post. Please let us know if you are still having trouble viewing them after refreshing your browser. Thanks!
Patience and humility are virtues that are yours to discover before promoting your achievements.
this is in response to the comment that WolframAlpha should have been named something easier to remember. I think it’s fine but here is a couple of suggestions:
WolframAlamadingdong
or
Wolfmotherramalamadingdong 😀
just kidding guys
Best of luck
e
Very nice, interesting mathematical angle, I still need to figure out how to apply this mathematical feature, I wonder about how the user’s location affects the searcher’s answer and also about how it will work on non mathematical subjects.
I asked question about Ukraine and have gotten absolutely wrong information about languages. I know approximately percentage of Ukrainian – Russian speaking population and was surprised to find wrong INFO about this question.Inside the web page http://www81.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ukraine
one can find that population that speaks Ukrainian language – 97%, but people speaks Russian – 1,7%.
On the other hand, according the Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language_in_Ukraine 34 % of Ukrainian claims that there native language is Russian.
I love this WolframAlpha and enjoy studding new staff with it, but probably after creating successfully working engine it’s time for creating truthful database?
When will I be able to download? Todays date 5-22-09
Thanks,
King
Just wondering if there is an online virtual keyboard that we can use to input special symbols.
Example) degree – temperature, subscript, pi, etc