Wolfram Alpha Launch, the begining of A.I.?

As many of you may be aware Wolfram the company famous mostly for their Mathmatica software is this weekend Alpha testing Wolfram Alpha.

The system quickly crashed exceeding their QPS or queries per second limit and the system quickly folded. It then went to an error screen that had a link to the video of the launch.

www.justin.tv...

I pulled a couple of frame grabs that I felt most accurately described the feelings of some of the launch participants in the control room at Wolfram Alpha.

This first one was first in the video so I will begin with that image.




I titled this one Wolfram Alpha Launch Head Scratch

This second frame grab below is I think one of the funniest. It sums up the feeling of likely a number of the operations people at the Wolfram Alpha Launch.




I titled this one Wolfram Alpha Launch Face Palm

I was so amused with this one that I nearly took the time to make an animation closeup of the entire face palm event. Maybe later when I have more time. You may already be able to find one on 4chan.

Well that is the amusing part of the story. The important part is to me for this discussion is what will this system lead to.

I think it is the technological basis for a public accessible A.I. or Artificial Intelligence.

I can imagine myself in the near future working on a project where I need a quick calculation of a very technical nature and I just pull out my 4G smart phone and pull up WolframAlpha and start using my thumbs or stylus to quickly input the computation query parameters, then obtaining the result in a few seconds.

My portable device will have access to the beginning of an A.I. type of computational engine with huge integrated database access.

I will be checking back with this application site over the weekend and trying to get some computation done on my Palm Treo. I might wait until the official launch on Monday if they manage to make it through the weekend.

[edit on 5/16/2009 by UFOTECH]

At this rate, after watching a few TED videos, you won't have to pull out your cell phone, thats hog breath now, telepath neck collars, and brain implanted google, is the future.

WolframAlpha, people expected to be asking question to god himself, it's a program just like anyother, just a bit more on topic.

It's nice to know I won't have to terminal in to my box at home to run Mathematica when I need the results for a particular integration or Fourier transform. I'm actually a little surprised. They're effectively placing the entire Mathematica engine online for free.

Really, WTH were they thinking? I can literally type in a normal Mathematica expression and the website parses it. ie/

Plot[x^2 sin(x), [x, 0, 10]]

They're crazy.

[edit on 16-5-2009 by Xtraeme]

Wolfram only works from known information, the whole premise behind AI is that it can use superior computing power and algorithms to figure out previously unknowns faster than humans can. Until it can start rattling off new prime numbers like its reading from a script then I'm not too worried about it going all Skynet on the humans.

The system will evolve I think, I did not say it was already at the level of an A.I. but that this I think could certainly lead to such a system.

Think about the information obtained from digesting all of these human queries. When the system grows and evolves over time we could be looking at the beginning of an A.I. in my opinion. What people do with this will alter it beyond its current design parameters.

Originally posted by Xtraeme
It's nice to know I won't have to terminal in to my box at home to run Mathematica when I need the results for a particular integration or Fourier transform. I'm actually a little surprised. They're effectively placing the entire Mathematica engine online for free.

Really, WTH were they thinking? I can literally type in a normal Mathematica expression and the website parses it. ie/

Plot[x^2 sin(x), [x, 0, 10]]

They're crazy.

[edit on 16-5-2009 by Xtraeme]

Crazy like a fox I think in this economy. Who can afford to have a copy of Mathmatica on their Net Book? You can not run it on your iPhone for certain but you can access this application online.

I think they realize that by plugging their computational engine into all of these databases and making it public access they will grow their users to enormous scale and then they can sell it to google. Do you think google would but Mathmatica? No I think not but they would buy Wolfram Alpha if it had some number of million users.

We only have one machine that has Mathmatica on it and other users access that machine remotely but we do not have access to it on portable devices. Mostly because they will not run the software in place because it is designed for Win XP not Palm OS or any other smart phone OS for that matter.

Originally posted by UFOTECH

I think it is the technological basis for a public accessible A.I. or Artificial Intelligence.

Yep. I would say that Alpha has something between 2 to 5 IQ. It would take an enormous effort to upgrade the abilities to a level of an idiot, as far as the communication skills are concerned.

We have already tested it; it's in a related thread here.

Word of caution. Alpha returns California Sales Tax as 6.25%, which is an indicative that databases are not updated. There are many features there from Matematica. You need to learn from the shown examples how to input to the search engine and also learn what kind of knowledge base Alpha handles.

It's a clever system for retrieving and processing information, but it by no means anything like AI. It doesn't do anything/thinking by itself and certainly isn't conscious.

Please direct your comments to this ongoing Thread (posted on Fri Apr 10 2009 )

[www.abovetopsecret.com...]Wolfram Alpha is coming, science geeks get ready! [/url]


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