Wolfram|Alpha is Coming!

A new breathrough in web searching has been announced by Stephen Wolfram: Wolfram|Alpha is Coming!

In the article, Wolfram describes the breakthrough as “…vastly smarter than (and different from) Google. Google simply retrieves documents based on keyword searches. Google doesn’t understand the question or the answer, and doesn’t compute answers based on models of various fields of human knowledge.”

We’ve talked about artificial intelligence in this blog before, and how the ideas in Wolfram’s NKS (A New Kind of Science) lend themselves uniquely to its potential development. I think we’re beginning to see being taken, through the Wolfram|Alpha project, the first few baby steps towards a rigorous form of human-thought-oriented computer intelligence.

What is Wolfram|Alpha? It’s a huge store of knowledge that can be interacted with. That can be interacted with, is the operable (new) notion. In Wolfram’s words:

Let’s say we succeed in creating a system that knows a lot, and can figure a lot out. How can we interact with it?

The way humans normally communicate is through natural language. And when one’s dealing with the whole spectrum of knowledge, I think that’s the only realistic option for communicating with computers too.

Of course, getting computers to deal with natural language has turned out to be incredibly difficult. And for example we’re still very far away from having computers systematically understand large volumes of natural language text on the web.

But if one’s already made knowledge computable, one doesn’t need to do that kind of natural language understanding.

All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do.

Look for it to go live here on May 5, 2009.

Being that the article quoted from above came out March 5, quite a weekend buzz has been generated. Here are some links to articles which discuss Wolfram’s announcement:

Slashdot: Wolfram Promises Computing That Answers Questions

Gizmos for Geeks: Wolfram Promises Computing That Answers Questions

twine.com: Wolfram Alpha is Coming and It Could Be As Important As Google

Nova Spivack: Wolfram Alpha is Coming and It Could Be As Important As Google

Syber News: Wolfram Alpha Computes Answers to Factual Questions – This is Going to be Big

bbgm: Computing Knowledge: Nova Spivack on Wolfram|Alpha

Life Under the Big Top: Plethora of Pinatas

Polizeros.com: Wolfram Alpha: Search Engine that Calculates

CNET News: Wolfram|Alpha: Next major search breakthrough?

blogs.zdnet: Wolfram|Alpha: A new paradigm for using computers and the web

Latest Venture News: Wolfram|Alpha: It’s like plugging into an electronic brain

ecpm blog: Wolfram|Alpha is a new search technology, from the creator of Mathematica

tech.blorge: Wolfram|Alpha: Better search engine than Google

reflections.concept-delivery.com: Wolfram|Alpha Goes Viral

Base Technology: Wolfram|Alpha: computational knowledge search engine

Intrinsitivity: Wolfram|Alpha

Joho The Blog: Wolfram computes it all

World of It: Searching something new

Stay tuned!

 

Is Artificial Intelligence Emergent?

On page 628 of Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, he states:

There has in the past been a great tendency to assume that given all its apparent complexity, human thinking must somehow be an altogether fundamentally complex process, not amenable at any level to simple explanation or meaningful theory.

But from the discoveries in this book we now know that highly complex behavior can in fact arise even from very simple basic rules. and from this it immediately becomes conceivable hat there could in reality be quite simple mechanisms that underlie human thinking.

Certainly there are many complicated details to the construction of the brain, and no doubt there are specific aspects of human thinking that depend on some of these details. But I strongly suspect that there is a definite core to the phenomenon of human thinking that is largely independent of such details—and that will in the end turn out to be based on rules that are rather simple.

Any student of science fiction knows of the dilemma of which Wolfram speaks —  the brain is generally considered to be potentially such a complex thing to understand, that only the greatest minds toiling for a long time in the distant future would ever have even a glimmer of hope of puzzling out a working model.

And truly, when it comes to the Holy Grail of replicating a human-like intelligence coupled with artificial life, research has thus far fallen short.

However, Wolfram’s conjecture must be studied a bit more closely. Could it be that we were over-reaching, and really, we would first see artificial life coupled with a human-like artificial intelligence emerge from a seemingly simpler system and set of rules? Universal computers are built from the same such simple rules and initial conditions. Whatever the Universe might be, we can agree that the human brain is a computer – does this imply that reproducing a human-like artificial intelligence could be more within reach than we thought?

Perhaps we’ll see intelligence emerge from simplicity. And perhaps not. The main point I believe Wolfram was trying to make is that, when modeling intelligence, it is very useful to look at simple systems like ECAs, or perhaps only a few levels more complicated. Truly, there is much yet to discover in this very promising field, who knows what might emerge?