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Yesterday, I went to a demo given by Stephen Wolfram about his new Wolfram|Alpha project. Some people are hyping it as a Google-killer, but it's not really like that at all. It's more like Encyclopedia Britannica with a built-in calculator — a cathedral of information built carefully by Top Experts™ behind a context-sensitive query engine with the ability to automatically produce charts and graphs for the output.
It was particularly interesting because it seemed much more in-line with the vision of the future lauded in Bill Gates's original version of The Road Ahead — where CD-ROM-based information was poised to reshape the world1 — than with today's Web 2.0 common wisdom. There's no user-interactive experience, no crowd-sourcing, no social anything. Instead, you ask questions, and the almighty black box delivers Answers from on high.
That seems like it might be useful if it's got answers in a domain you're interested in — and if you can see where those answers came from and their justification — but it's no Google-killer, nor the next Wikipedia.
So anyway, today I came across True Knowledge, a competitor of sorts — it tries to "know" the meaning of your query by means of a big database of semantic connections and then give you The Right Answer. After getting bored of trying it out on practical questions (sometimes it knows, usually it doesn't), I asked it the thing that's on Anya's mind these days: "Are monsters real?", and it came back with "Sorry, I do not know whether real is untrue of every fictional species."
Okay, fair enough. And the cool thing is that it shows the interpretation of the question below: "Are any fictional species (made-up species in a novel, movie, game etc.) real, implying a perceptible existence to a significant subset of people?" Of course, that raises another question: when you put it that way, and still can't give a simple answer, isn't it obvious that this whole enterprise is doomed?
So next, I discovered they've hard-coded in an answer about the existence of God — it doesn't know, but unlike the monsters question, doesn't give you the opportunity to give the answer. Total cop out.
Next up: "When will the universe end?" And the answer:
Well, there's some perspective!
Tonight's new NOVA is about the recent discovery of tiny hominids that co-existed with modern man, which they are calling Hobbits. For real.
"Are hobbits real?" yields:
But it claims to not know the answer. I think the core problem here is that it has issues with reality.
(And yes, it says "timeses".)
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