Wolfram Alpha's link for when it's up and running.
Another fascinating physicist! Seems there's a new knowledge/metadata processor on the horizon. Wolfram Alpha is due out in a few weeks. It will be free to all the world. Corporate sponsors will be picking up the tab and advertising on the site. This was an interesting program, long at 1:45:57. It gets more interesting as it goes along.
Quick and very incomplete guide...
The first 30 minutes is an overview of the calculations the WA can address.
Between 30:00 and 45:00 he discusses the ingredients and structure of the his creation: 1) Data Curation, 2) Implementation of computations and algorithms, 3) linguistic understanding, 4) automated presentation - presenting what's important in response to queries.
At 45 minutes Wolfram takes questions from the audience.
At 49 minutes David Weinberger asks about the transparency of the metadata used.
At 54 minutes Jonathan Zittrain suggested that it sounds like a knowledge boiler maker with people shoveling in the knowledge. At 1:15 mins, Zittrain jokingly asks "will it answer the meaning of life?"
At 1:18...an inquiry about the transparency of the mathematical & source codes used. Wolfram suggests that the code may not be as useful as just proving or disproving the information results.
At 1:25 the challenges of linguistics.
At 1:30...we'll be using public data. (Earlier (at 1:03)Wolfram said the US govt is a good source for clean, useful data.) Then went on to discuss what is and isn't useful/reliable in Wikipedia and how Wikipedia's Open Source model does and does not fit the Wolfram Alpha.
At 1:38 discussed the 1 minute delay from NY Stock Exchange.
Novelty queries aren't what WA was designed for.
At 1:41 discussed potential synergies...w/ Google, etc.
Stephen Wolfram entry in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram
For more comments visit: http://education.zdnet.com/?p=2533
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