8th
Update: I’ve now seen the demo — it is ridiculously awesome. I can’t imagine that they won’t have at least some growing pains and/or scaling issues, but that concern is moot — the product itself is groundbreaking and moreover real — they’re not at risk of anything Cuil-esque.
Nova posted some major scoop over the weekend — he and Stephen are good friends. Wolfram Alpha has some truly breakthrough capabilities that you’ll be hearing more about soon.
I first encountered Stephen’s work in college re: chaos theory – my professor Jerry Gollub is “the” expert on fluid dynamics. It was a physics class for non-majors (me=Philosophy+English) but the concepts introduced therein have stuck with me.
The appplication does indeed bear something of a likeness to the Austin-based Cyc project, as Nova points out.
For those of your who care about the relationships of Wolfram Alpha to cellular autoata, Nova writes:
“This is not to say that Wolfram Alpha IS a cellular automata itself — but rather that it is similarly based on fundamental rules and data that are recombined to form highly sophisticated structures. The knowledge and intelligence it contains are extremely modularized and can be used to synthesize answers to factual questions nobody has asked yet.
The questions are broken down to their basic parts and then simple reasoning takes places, and answers are computed on the vast knowledge base in the system. It appears the system can make inferences and do some basic reasoning across what it knows — it is not purely reductionist in that respect; it is generative, it can synthesize new knowledge, if asked to.”
Disclosure: Twine and Nova and Wolfram Alpha are clients.
