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From: BerkmanCenter
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  • Ahh Wolfram|Alpha, solving math homeworks in the blink of an eye since 2009. :)

  • Don't get me wrong though. It really cool, I just don't feel like watching this cuz it's an hour long

  • I like the fact that I don't have time to even watch thing

  • nice video! thanks for uploading!

  • wow! great video!

  • This type of tool will only increase the demand for people who are good at making decisions after seeing the data.

  • It'll take me forever to solve for those assignments. Thanks wolfram! =)) Totally love it! <3

  • Are we talking about Asimov's Positronic Brain?

  • LOL. I like how he is introduced as Unassuming, and his shirt is super wrinkly.

  • Is the cameraman stoned, or just stupid? Hello, show us the projection! We don't need a zoom in of Mr. Wolfram's face to understand what he is saying.

  • Wolfram|Alpha is such an amazing tool. I hope that someday it becomes more important than Google.

  • great video.

    "imaging radars" +"mathforum" google.com.

  • Cameraman sucks!

  • someone, watch the whole video

  • why are jews so intelligent?

  • @6Diego1Diego9

    Well, in my opinion, looking at their history , for thousand years they didn't have a country to leave, they were expelled from their homes, cities and countries they lived. For years they were basically surviving. That has made them to work very hard and to work closer with people. All the best doctors, lawyer and etc are Jews. That's my opinion. They are just genetically brilliant.

  • @6Diego1Diego9  stephen is iranian and Bahais

  • @6Diego1Diego9 Because they have money to get educated.

  • i wonder if wolfram alpha will tell me why 19 people disliked this video...

  • @dtek40k for sure he know!!!! too simple

  • Now I can do my Calculus homework without doing any Calculus!

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  • I really appreciate WolframAlpha; it's like discovering the Internet all over again.

  • This "computational knowledge engine" is definitely the future of obtaining knowledge on the internet. And the best thing about it is that It can only get better as the years go by.

  • I've been playing with this a few days and it is a great program. The thing I notice though is that it is not all that intuitve yet. . Something as simple as plotting a line from two points is very sensitive to how the data is entered. Entering (3,4) (5,7) or "points (3,4) (5,7)" will not get you a graph. Neither will the words "graph" or "plot" before the coordinate pairs. Typing "line" before the points will give you what you want though. I think a good manual would solve this.

  • why can't we do law just like this? Instead of people being able to buy their innocence if they are really guilty.

  • @rich2rock Because once you get away from math, things are not black and white. Take killing. We say it is OK to kill in self-defense, but already you see self-defense is a judgement call. You can't run a red light, but cops and ambulences do it all the time, and if you did it to get your wife to the hospital in an emergency, I bet a cop seeing this wouldn't give you a ticket either. That's why we need good judges. Computers can't handle judgement because the variables are too complex.

  • @dkw12002 Until computers get more advanced that us and start evolving and become independent and start their own civilization. Futurama. Sorry.

  • ridiculously awesome

  • 2:18 to skip the bullshit

  • WolframAlpha let me get an A in Calculus 2! Thank you very much Wolfram!

  • Why doesn't this guy have a Nobel Prize yet?

  • This computational "engine" is the kind of algorithm that would enable the masses of humans to function optimally. Good, accurate, & relevant knowledge dissemination & consumption inevitably become knowledge creation itself among the users. Spending days memorizing volumes of medical facts, math formulas, historical events and names, etc. can be impressive; but that's no way to live and to function, when knowledge --- both specific and general --- grows at the rate it's been growing.

  • 'Tis the next logical step in the evolution of humanity knowledge. At the beginning, learning to read and write simple sentences and then adding, multiplying, or dividing 2 by 4 were very important. A bit later, learning to do multi-variable calculus was important ... And later still ... things, ideas, processes, & general/specific knowledge have grown exponentially. That's too much, for any one to learn or to retain in the normal way...

  • Wolfram|Alpha assumes NASDAQ:ORCL for both SUN and JAVA. Poor Sun Microsystems...

  • Most interesting ! Thanks for posting !

  • this app for the iphone is beast

  • the point of the video is the input and the result from wolfram alpha.. that the thing we should see... berkmancenter should hire a decent videoman,

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  • excellent work!

  • I wish Obama would ask Wolfram Research to handle implementing his Open Government Directive.

  • Wolfram looks like Dr. Octopus.

  • Wolfram is Dr.Octopus.

  • this is the first video I've ever seen that's longer than an hour

  • Wolfram|Alpha is simply genius.

  • @DirtyMidgetStudios wolfram si simply a great genius

  • @DirtyMidgetStudios More like is simply a faggot.

  • OMG these ppl are so fucking smart

    i dont even understand half of the words he's saying

  • just love it at 01:25:31 !!..or what about 01:11:15 just hilarious!! ... anyone??

  • Wolfram published a paper on particle physics at 16 and got his PhD at 20!! What a smart ass!!

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  • Askification! I love his language

  • holy shit this is long

  • dude. you're awesome! THANKS FOR WOLFRAM ALPHA!

  • thanks mister wolfram

  • Yes, I agree. JZ is really cute- the camera man should have spent more time on him

  • My comment was truncated. (Ah paragraphing is not allowed.) My comments on the camera man stand. Let me try to add what was omitted. Watching Wolfram's head for 1hour and 45 minutes is extremely dull; we need to see the input, the syntax. The camera guy must be on the take from Google.

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  • 11 it's one louder!

  • on a scalle from 1- 10 taht was definiatly a 10 i like how you ended it VERY FUNNY haha ... i didnt think i could luagh so much not only that but i luaghed so hard [=

  • yes this was a great video i really enjoyed watching this video it made me laugh and i really have to say it was very intertaining

  • stephen is right...he is building a system for finding the answer of all. during this...many idiots believe in a god...it's a answer of time...we will all see it

  • but too bad, the answer are those within the internet. so you can't get the answer who is GOD. Well, you can always try to think out of the box

  • oh...i meaned the "new kind of science", not the alpha wolfram....alpha wolfram isn't perfect ! but to decode the development of the universe is his area ! i don't think that there is a god....i'm with stephen's opiniion, the universe is a big calculate program and we and what we see are evolutions of it. we can show this process in a formula.

  • Nonsense, all it can do is play with numbers, don't ask it who the wife is of Tom Cruise, what a sunflower is, what it has to say about the CNN newsstation or more info about Clint Eatswood than just his birthdate/place...sigh

  • I need to add my own data to augment its own and wish he had gone into more detail about how we should organize ours to make it compatible.

    I'm trying to find a way to map a small town's local economy. This looks like a great way to organize all that data so that his engine can help us explore it.

  • Correction: "This looks like a great way to organize all that ***NUMERIC***data so that his engine can help us explore it."

    For everything else it's useless.

  • Right now I agree it appears quite challenged semantically speaking. But I expect that to change rapidly. There is a great deal more information available than merely the numeric, it's just not all that clear how to reference it unambiguously with natural language to yield a useful tool. I'm hoping they take us the challenge of integrating all of the economic data generated by government agencies into a form that will help us become a wiser electorate.

  • "challenged semantically speaking"?

    Seriously, how more semantically correct can a person be who types: sunflower?

    I have tons of examples like that.

    What I get annoyed about is that the guy made claims that turned out to be nothing but bull. He said he had found a way to turn language into numbers and "calculate results". What he failed to tell us is that it's mainly numbers related. Most people however search for things that are not related to numbers.

  • sunflower worked fine for me. (came up with a lot of info about the plant, and offered to tell me about the word instead.)

    I disagree that its limited. The site is filled with examples of stuff that does work. I have Mathematica, which has access to a lot of the same data, or I'd use WolframAlpha a lot more.

  • "sunflower worked fine for me. (came up with a lot of info about the plant"

    You're such a liar, it's isn't even funny anymore. All it comes up with are Latin names, it's nowhere near to what a site like Wikipedia provides.

    "I disagree that its limited. "

    You're such a liar...geesh. All the examples are all related to data. Type any famous name and all you get is a birth date/place and profession. Type in any plant or animal....again, very limited.

  • I type in the name of my own site, can't be found, even if it's ranked #1 with many search arguments in any major seach engine. I type in "Marco Borsato", the best selling artist in the Netherlands and I get a comparison between the place "Marco" in Brasil and "Borsad" (even different spelling) in India, when I put the full name between quotes.

    I type the same in Google and you get 890,000 pages!

  • "The site is filled with examples of stuff that does work"

    That only proves that THOSE samples work, it's a marketing strategy, don't you get it? Have you seen how many people and hardware they need for this? They're not going to do this all for free without getting any return. All the examples are pre-frabricated and are all based on science and numbers. Don't ask more about Abraham Lincoln,because all you get is that he was president and his birth date/place.... how useful...sigh

  • I'm really not trying to mislead you or misrepresent the site. I think you're expecting an encyclopedic source, like Wikipedia, while I'm expecting something a lot more structured--where the information returned just places you at a specific place in an abstract "idea space" encompassing all of human knowledge.

    But you do make a great suggestion--That they should incorporate links to other well known information sources of different types whenever the "node" requested has an entry there.

  • "I think you're expecting an encyclopedic source, like Wikipedia"

    No, I'm not, I've been reading his blog and watched related videos for months now. He gave the impression that he managed to compute with language, he never said that it was basically limited to numbers.

    I agree, it's great for people who need those numbers, but how many realy do, he pretended it to be more than it really is and that annoys me.

  • I expected to get answers on things like "largest city of Canada", "first pope", "translate table to french", "who discovered australia", etc

  • I'm disappointed with the limitations as well, but it is a first stab at an enormously difficult problem and it is likely to evolve rapidly--the way mathematica did, to encompass more and more of what you and I expect.

    I'm probably unrealistically excited about the prospects for it, but do think they're likely to incorporate useful ideas, like linking entries more usefully to other sites. I also think we're not getting to see the full extent of it due to legal limits on their use of the data.

  • *** Right now I agree it appears quite challenged semantically speaking. But I expect that to change rapidly ***

    Oh you do huh? Whooptie freaking do. I'm sure that alleviates everyone's concerns (snort).

  • As a free information source online I rate this as about a 7 with wikipedia and google being examples of 10s.

    As a new approach to organizing the world's information I rate it as high as the web itself. It appears to be a fundamental extension to the idea of uniform resource identifiers and a means of connecting together all parts of the semantic web and various private databases.

    What made the web wasn't so much Tim's software but what people did with it. We'll have to wait to find out.

  • Wolfram Alpha is an epic fail when you look up things not related to numbers.

  • JZ is very handsome

  • It's a bit silly to go and compare this to Skynet. The system appears to have two deficiencies that prevent it from becoming a Skynet-esque AI: it does not engage in self-directed learning, and it has no curiosity.

    Were that to be the case, it would have to be able to identify weak areas in its knowledge base, prioritize those weak spots, carry out some form of self-directed search for information, and translate that into the format necessary to integrate with the rest of the knowledge base

  • what's the difference between the gdp of france and italy,

    17$ per hour times 365 days,

    number of stars in the universe / the number of cells in the human body

    the distance between uranus and jupiter / the distance between the sun and the moon, this one won't return anything even though each of the two elements of the question can be answered individually.

    Having a function/syntax to get names of items in a category of objects would be nice. ex: names of constellations, names of cities in

  • ....BORING!

  • Is this the end of library science or the future of that field?

  • here's the source code to WolframAlpha:

    PRINT 42

    Cool!

  • Why not a more novel approach like ....

    The Miss Manners Knowledge Engine ....

    The John Madden Knowledge Engine ....

    The Man On The Street Knowledge Engine ....

  • Knowledge management equals learning??? Learning is acquiring knowledge and knowledge management is analysis. Actually by knowledge management here you probably mean partiality. I think Wolfram|Alpha will be actually searching a data base or Website rather than the Internet.

    The beauty of the Internet is on its impartiality, and that information is never taken for granted. When it comes out my first inquire will be on global warming and see how factual the "information managers" are.

  • Agreed!

    Google need not worry, but they probably got some great ideas out of this ;)

    ... so did I... Not from Wolfram, but he comfirmed something vital

  • Coool, maybe use the web to sort out this type of information and then assist the user to verify it??

  • Incredible. Are there many academic institutions in US academia-land? Where's the focal point for academics when it comes to studying the internet and all its parts? Berkman Center is stunning. Good help. Thanks

  • umm... skynet in disguise much?

  • Don't be silly, Wolfram is English. Everyone knows Skynet is run by the *Americans*.

  • The answer i 42 noobenstein. Seriously, that's what it gives.

  • Sound quality was pretty poor for this.

    Really enjoyed it though!

  • Man, that host is annoying....cracking jokes, answering for the speaker, constantly interrupting. Dude, it's not about you. Just introduce the speaker then sit down and be quiet.

  • Great free advertising for Da-Lite

  • He's clumsy with his hands. He might be one of the smartest people in the world, got a PhD at 20 and wrote a paper on particle physics at the age of 14.

  • This will be actually working and useful AI !

  • is will be great for me and others in university/college...nice job!

  • So this is some kind of Flight-Of-Thought enabler ?

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  • Now there's an intelectual in his element,

    His assistant says "93 internet users in the Vatican City, they must be doing other things" you could literally see his mind wander onto that idea for a second, then he's straight back onto the issue at hand.

  • Definitely looking forward to trying it out sometime this May - when it's ready.

    Inspiring - such fun to see these things - technology - developing in front of our eyes & so fast.

    The Internet savy are lucky to be living during this period & to watch it continue to explode from 1995.

    I've can remember the wonder of first landing on the moon - this seems to me to have been the ultimate inspiration to many in IT.

    For example it is the root of why I became a software now Internet developer.

  • this wold be great if comes with voice recognition instead of typing questions for exp. in my iphone!

  • Why is when a new technology comes out that has ai in it people say sky-net?

  • i don't see it replacing google.

    more like complementing it.

    google is an index of contents available on the web. it gives us raw data while wolframalpha purports to give us cooked knowledge.

    while google will always give us materials to be cooked, sometime it requires time consuming efforts to collect, sort and process them. on the other hand, cooked results are not always the ones we wanted.

  • sounds like sky-net to me

  • kind of long but my question is

    how does it compare to Google in porn searching?

  • well...the only question i have is:

    How have they done putting a video of 1 hour and 45 min on youtube?!

  • lol nice one

  • Jeez...can't some of you folks just listen to words? Does EVERYTHING have to be visual? Maybe they didn't want to show the program until release anyway.

  • Wait, but wouldn't that enable all humans to have resource to an Einsteinian mind?

  • in my belief, internet will evolve into an integral organ of modern humans. once we found ways to brain-like computation engine with simultaneous processing and parallel activation of data stored in memory, and a way to interpret brain activities into textual chunks, then we will be able to extend our brain capacity and processing speed.

    we all be jeopardy champions. i am not sure we will be einstens, but certainly it will help most of us in understanding quantum electrodynamics.

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  • I see. Thanks

  • camerman sucks ass

  • Asking ALL the wrong questions.

    Unbelievable!

  • Perhaps after the launch they'll post another video with all the screenshots. I'd watch it again - I'd already listened to this on mp3. Can't wait for the launch, I've had it bookmarked for weeks. ;-J

  • That looked like it had the potential to be an amazing talk and webcast.... if only they could get a cameraman that doesn't suck ass. I can't stand to watch this.

  • Shit video, we can't see anything what he's doing.

  • It would be great if this were REALLY competition for Google....Nothing works as an absolute monopoly...

    Great work, Stephen!

    Now if Wolframalpha gets a grip on popular culture questions, we'll be seeing real and viable competition...Hope it happens!

  • what an incredible program, sounds like a person will only be limited by their own imagination,

  • How much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?

  • LOL... you guys are discussing the bloody cameraman and the quality of images... erm try listening to what he says... it's an incredible sounding tool. Unlike Google and search engines where you (the user) has to point and shoot at optimized search results... you get the answer... flames. I wonder what the Wolfram Engine will say about "Google" 5 stars.

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  • Wolpha? Why not just wolf? Lemme see your laptop I need to wolf something!

  • How about we give it the nickname Wolpha?

  • I will have to try it

  • It's amusing that you note this and get a thumbs down. It's true. They have no business presentation skills. Either that or they are deliberately trying to position themselves as academics. It's sad that they don't try harder to present it better. It does look brilliant however.

  • He got lots of thumbs down I suspect because it looks nothing like a fancy google. It's not a search engine. It almost needs to have this on the first page of the website I suspect.

    Every not technical person that I've discussed this with says "It sounds like Ask Jeeves, you remember Ask Jeeves?".

    Looks great. I can't wait for it to be released. I just wonder how they'll monetarize the site or if that's their intention? I should imagine that the computation requires some fast computers.

  • That's exactly what the title tell us: Wolfram discusses Wolfram|Alpha. Sadly the cameraman aparently was not able to properly show the screen behind Stephen once and gave up trying to do it the rest of presentation...

    Otherwise we could be able to see something working.

  • Worst cameraman ever! :( Great talk ruined.

  • Agree 100%. All over the place.

  • I think Wolfram needs to pee.

    Moving from one leg to the other. My son does that all the time... :-)))

    There is also a little mathematical error on the second line on slide three.

    Wish I could see the Q&A on the laptop!!!

  • Really sad the slides thing... I was hoping to see something! That sucks!

  • I was so excited about this video, but without the slides it might as well be a blank page...

  • "Wolfram|Alpha" is just not as catchy as "google". It's about time there was some competition out there.

  • I think it's a pretty catchy name. Plus, Alpha will probably be removed later so it's just "Wolfram"

  • It's not competition for google. From what I've seen it looks like a statistical number cruncher. Looks like a lot of high level maths with real data already entered into it for you.

    Will have to wait and see what exactly it can and can't do. I don't think it searches web-pages though.

  • it's a Computational Knowledge Engine not a search engine!

  • Why not just point the camera at a wall since that's what you did.

  • this videographer is an idiot. where is the overhead!!! typical college freshman in A/V class

  • Shame on Harvard for not knowing how to record a video. I saw this tool at a closed preview and it is amazing. The audio just cannot do it justice.

  • 5 to 6 million lines of code?!

  • And that's Mathematica code, which is more potent than Java or C++.

  • 1/5 because it fails on not showing the slides. Anyone knows where to find them?

  • man he really does look like george costanza!

  • How can we judge the engine if can't see how it works! that is if anyone knows where we can get the slides... let us know :)

  • Wolfram Phoenix.

  • very interesting but near useless without the video projection!

  • this sucks. i want to see the sides!!

  • Smart guy with a seemingly valuable technology. But, who wants to watch someone talking for almost 2 hours with no visual references? Lame presentation. Guess we will just need to wait for the real thing.

  • I'm excited! :)

  • this is one of the worst recordings of a public lecture with slides. i want to see the slides. the most information and interest is in the slides.

  • It wasn't slides, but actual Alpha working, using a IP tunnel.

    In any case, I think that Wolfram requested no Alpha screenshots in the recording, so we'll have to wait until mid may to see it in action.

  • There's a separate video linked in this one where they show some (admittedly fuzzy) views of W|A output for several minutes. Maybe Wolfram compromised?

  • And its nearly May already ^^