Wolfram Alpha Search Engine Turns 10: Remains Independent, Private, and Free of External Advertising 41
For more than three decades, Stephen Wolfram, a 59-year-old scientist, software designer and entrepreneur, has built software that has attracted an avid following among mathematicians and scientists. His Mathematica program for symbolic mathematical computation and its programming language, Wolfram Language, are favorites of the intelligentsia of the quant world in universities and corporations. Wolfram Alpha, one of his creations, is a unique search engine that does not forage the web, but culls its own painstakingly curated database to find answers. This week, the search engine turned 10.
On the big occasion, Mr. Wolfram has shared some insight: It was a unique and surprising achievement when it first arrived, and over its first decade it's become ever stronger and more unique. It's found its way into more and more of the fabric of the computational world, both realizing some of the long-term aspirations of artificial intelligence, and defining new directions for what one can expect to be possible. Oh, and by now, a significant fraction of a billion people have used it. And we've been able to keep it private and independent, and its main website has stayed free and without external advertising.
As the years have gone by, Wolfram Alpha has found its way into intelligent assistants like Siri, and now also Alexa. It's become part of chatbots, tutoring systems, smart TVs, NASA websites, smart OCR apps, talking (toy) dinosaurs, smart contract oracles, and more. It's been used by an immense range of people, for all sorts of purposes. Inventors have used it to figure out what might be possible. Leaders and policymakers have used it to make decisions. Professionals have used it to do their jobs every day. People around the world have used it to satisfy their curiosity about all sorts of peculiar things. And countless students have used it to solve problems, and learn. The footage of the launch of Alpha, from 10 years ago.
As the years have gone by, Wolfram Alpha has found its way into intelligent assistants like Siri, and now also Alexa. It's become part of chatbots, tutoring systems, smart TVs, NASA websites, smart OCR apps, talking (toy) dinosaurs, smart contract oracles, and more. It's been used by an immense range of people, for all sorts of purposes. Inventors have used it to figure out what might be possible. Leaders and policymakers have used it to make decisions. Professionals have used it to do their jobs every day. People around the world have used it to satisfy their curiosity about all sorts of peculiar things. And countless students have used it to solve problems, and learn. The footage of the launch of Alpha, from 10 years ago.
You have to Google it. (Score:1)
Because WA doesn't have a link to it.
Indeed (Score:4, Insightful)
"Wolfram Alpha Search Engine Turns 10: Remains Independent, Private, and Free of External Advertising" ...and it still sucks.
Don't get me wrong, I still like it, but still, they could listen a bit more to their users.
Re: Indeed (Score:2, Interesting)
They aren't going to. I once interviewed there (in Champaign, IL) and they are elistist pricks.
I interviewed for a security position and they kept asking me about "the other type of buffer overflow that overflows left". I emphatically insisted that buffers don't work that way and it cost me the position.
Years later upon reflection I realized they didn't know what they were trying to ask and were trying to get me to distinguish between stack and heap overflows. While *memory* builds to the left on stack o
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I have found the folks at Wolfram to be very helpful. While it is true that their turn-around time for questions has grown along with the capabilities of the software, I always get answers, albeit some a little too abbreviated at times.
The language has a very solid foundation, as one might expect of CalTec's youngest PhD (Age 20), who had Richard Feynman as the chair of his thesis committee. Stephen Wolfram did well to attract some of the finest mathematical minds to get involved with its development.
My b
who actually uses Mathematica? (Score:1, Interesting)
Matlab yes, Maple maybe, but who are all these people who supposedly use Mathematica? As a computational scientist, I've never seen one in the wild.
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I'm a physicist and use Mathematica. So do most of my colleagues. Maple used to be used but is now almost extinct. Matlab is nonexistent. For what I need, Mathematica is much better than the other options.
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Re: It needs a better name. (Score:2)
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WA just isn't usable in a general case.
If you ask it "when does pikachu learn quick attack", it doesn't give you anything.
So you'd never think to ask it "what are pikachu's base stats", which it handles perfectly.
Stephen Wolfram bantering on AI (Score:2)
This is a recent segment of John Brockman's Possible Minds project. (I suspect the real purpose of this project is to make Ian McEwan feel like a total fish out of water. That's why in the photo they keep him far, far away from Danny Hillis, who alone among the group is able to square his inner wonk with his outer beer stein.)
The Cul-de-Sac of the Computational Metaphor [edge.org] — 13 May 2019
Plus, there's an old-timey Easter egg: edge.org in the only server I know of on the entire modern Internet still achingl
ReadWHATFM (Score:3)
You would think that after 10 years they would get around to publishing a user's manual. Good luck trying to guess the syntax in order to get the results you want. Natural language understanding? Yeah, right.
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