{"id":456,"date":"2009-03-08T13:47:54","date_gmt":"2009-03-08T20:47:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/?p=456"},"modified":"2009-03-08T13:47:54","modified_gmt":"2009-03-08T20:47:54","slug":"wolfram-alpha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/2009\/03\/wolfram-alpha\/","title":{"rendered":"Wolfram Alpha"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The remarkable (and prolific) Stephen Wolfram has an <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wolfram.com\/2009\/03\/05\/wolframalpha-is-coming\/\">idea<\/a> called Wolfram Alpha. People used to assume the &#8220;Star Trek&#8221; model of computers:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer.<\/p>\n<p>Which has proved to be quite distant from reality. Instead<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">But armed with <em>Mathematica<\/em> and NKS [<a title=\"Own it. But never have been able to justify picking up a copy of Mathematica (yet)\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/1579550088\/dubinkoinfo-20\">A New Kind of Science<\/a>] I realized there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not easy to do this. Every different kind of method and model\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand data\u00e2\u20ac\u201dhas its own special features and character. But with a mixture of <em>Mathematica<\/em> and NKS automation, and a lot of human experts, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m happy to say that we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve gotten a very long way.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m still a SearchMonkey guy at heart, so I wonder how much Wofram&#8217;s team is familiar with existing Semantic Web research and practice&#8211;because at a high level this seems very much like RDF with suitable queries thereupon. If that&#8217;s a good characterization, that&#8217;s A Good Thing, since practical application has been one of SemWeb&#8217;s weak spots.<\/p>\n<p>-m<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The remarkable (and prolific) Stephen Wolfram has an idea called Wolfram Alpha. People used to assume the &#8220;Star Trek&#8221; model of computers: that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer. Which has proved to be quite distant from reality. Instead But armed with Mathematica and&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,42,34,6,27,113,153,41,22,15],"tags":[667,662,661,664,663,666,183,181,182,665,106,660,668],"class_list":["post-456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai","category-aswemaythink","category-commercialism","category-intentional-web","category-languages","category-mark-logic","category-math","category-metadata","category-software","category-yahoo","tag-alpha","tag-anewkindofscience","tag-mathematica","tag-nks","tag-nlp","tag-practice","tag-query","tag-rdf","tag-rdfa","tag-research","tag-semweb","tag-wolfram","tag-wolframalpha"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8eo8l-7m","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=456"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":457,"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456\/revisions\/457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}