Why is the sky blue? We ran this and a few other questions by the new search engine Wolfram|Alpha today. Wolfram|Alpha plays around with 10+ trillion pieces of data to make knowledge computational -- if this, then that; this vs. that; if this occurs, what happens then. You know, what are the relationships between things. It's a valiant attempt at artificial intelligence, and fills a void between Google's vast search of static items and social media search of chat in real time.
Alas, this alpha thing feels more like beta. Wolfram|Alpha fails to answer basic queries and is still a babe in the woods of intelligence. It reminds us just a bit of Chris McKinstry's effort to build a vast artificial consciousness that could answer simple yes/no questions. McKinstry never got close to passing the Turing test, and eventually committed suicide.
Designing intelligence isn't easy. We look forward to seeing where Wolfram goes.
Wolfram|Alpha demo here. Image: Gari Baldi.
4 comments:
AI failed and it will continue to fail because that's not how the human brain works. If you really like this area definitely read Jeff Hawkins book 'On Intelligence: How A New Understanding of The Brain Will Lead To The Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines.' The book is brilliant and so is Jeff's new programming language. My wife works in this field so that's why I have been versed on the subject in recent years.
Why is Sky blue? SEO 2.0 alerted me to Lexxe (http://bit.ly/ee1nG), which did a pretty good job of answering that question unlike WA:
http://bit.ly/FgutO
Intelligence is not the product of how well it answers, but how well it learns. Any idiot can memorize the answers. Only intelligent individuals can sort through data and arrive at logical conclusions.
All this to say, I'm more interested to see how WA does six months from now than at launch.
It is pretty impressive that search engine. you can ask it if it will be the next skynet and it says that it won't.
Post a Comment