Wolfram Alpha

[jrv]

Any comments on "Wolfram Alpha"?

http://www.twine.com/item/122mz8lz9-4c/wolfram-alpha-is-coming-and-it-could-be-as-important-as-google

Looks like we can all pack up and go home :-).

John Velman

(Full disclosure:  I was the deparmental purchaser of Wolfram's pre-mathematica symbolic math program called -- as I recall-- SMP.  But I've never used Mathmatica).  

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[Dau, Frithjof]

Personally, I will wait for may, when it is launched. But even it it works really fine (then it will be a true milestone), it is somewhat unsatisfying to not having more information about the technologies behind ...

Frithjof


-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: John Velman [mailto:velman@...]
Gesendet: Dienstag, 10. März 2009 17:01
An: Conceptual Graphs List
Betreff: [CG:] Wolfram Alpha


Any comments on "Wolfram Alpha"?

http://www.twine.com/item/122mz8lz9-4c/wolfram-alpha-is-coming-and-it-could-be-as-important-as-google

Looks like we can all pack up and go home :-).

John Velman

(Full disclosure:  I was the deparmental purchaser of Wolfram's pre-mathematica symbolic math program called -- as I recall-- SMP.  But I've never used Mathmatica).  

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[John F. Sowa]

John V. and Frithjof,

JV> Looks like we can all pack up and go home.

FD> it is somewhat unsatisfying to not having more information
 > about the technologies behind ...

Doug Lenat has a good overview of their system:

    http://blog.cyc.com/2009/03/wolfram-alpha.html

 From that note and other sources, I would assume the following
summary of their technology:

  1. They are using databases of information that they have put
     together from various sources (including some they access
     dynamically for data about the weather or the stock market).

  2. They use a large collection of patterns of phrases (i.e.,
     templates) for recognizing four question types -- who, what,
     when, and where (with or without those actual question words).

  3. They have built mathematical/logical models (i.e., ontology
     plus a reasoning or computational method) for using the
     resources in #1 to answer questions of the types in #2.

  4. Their computational and logical methods are based on the
     very large and very sophisticated resources of Mathematica,
     which is the primary product of the Wolfram company:

     http://www.wolfram.com/

The original Mathematica product, which they began selling in 1988,
was based on Prolog.  Since then, they have developed their own
logic programming system, which has added many functions that go
far beyond plain vanilla Prolog.

The Mathematica product is widely used by major scientific and
engineering R & D institutions around the world.  (By the way,
we use it at VivoMind for testing our mathematical algorithms
before translating them to a lower-level language for better
performance.)

John


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[Robert Spillers]

Some parts of this message have been removed. Learn more about Nabble's security policy.

John,

You may remember that this is the sort of approach IBM  (Bryan Sivak, Ed Cooper, Martin van den Berg, Andras Kornai and others) used in the mid 1990's.  We (I was the Program Director) worked with Doug Lenat and Cyc, you were a consultant on the project as was John McCarthy. I commissioned a verb lexicon from CSLI at Stanford using WordNet as an ontology - we intended to commission an ontology from Cyc.  After I retired I persuaded IBM to release the lexicon to Stanford to be put in the public domain. I understand that a number of start ups have used the lexicon in their products (including VivoMind).  

IBM failed to see the value of the project and canceled it.  I had worked for IBM for thirty years, thought that was enough and retired.  All of the people who worked on the project eventually left IBM. 

Bryan and Ed had worked on a project at the University of Chicago involving the four  wh.. words.  I hired them when I was on campus to attend my godson's (and Bryan's) graduation.  Bryan and Ed founded InQuira.  Andras has been Chief Scientist at several companies.  Martin along with Livia Polanyi were original employees at PowerSet which was recently bought by Microsoft.

Bob

---

From: John F. Sowa <sowa@...>
To: cg@...
Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2009 10:34:48 PM
Subject: Re: [CG:] Wolfram Alpha

John V. and Frithjof,

JV> Looks like we can all pack up and go home.

FD> it is somewhat unsatisfying to not having more information
> about the technologies behind ...

Doug Lenat has a good overview of their system:

  http://blog.cyc.com/2009/03/wolfram-alpha.html

From that note and other sources, I would assume the following
summary of their technology:

1. They are using databases of information that they have put
    together from various sources (including some they access
    dynamically for data about the weather or the stock market).

2. They use a large collection of patterns of phrases (i.e.,
    templates) for recognizing four question types -- who, what,
    when, and where (with or without those actual question words).

3. They have built mathematical/logical models (i.e., ontology
    plus a reasoning or computational method) for using the
    resources in #1 to answer questions of the types in #2.

4. Their computational and logical methods are based on the
    very large and very sophisticated resources of Mathematica,
    which is the primary product of the Wolfram company:

    http://www.wolfram.com/

The original Mathematica product, which they began selling in 1988,
was based on Prolog.  Since then, they have developed their own
logic programming system, which has added many functions that go
far beyond plain vanilla Prolog.

The Mathematica product is widely used by major scientific and
engineering R & D institutions around the world.  (By the way,
we use it at VivoMind for testing our mathematical algorithms
before translating them to a lower-level language for better
performance.)

John


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[Enrico Franconi]

On 11 Mar 2009, at 06:34, John F. Sowa wrote:

> 3. They have built mathematical/logical models (i.e., ontology
>    plus a reasoning or computational method) for using the
>    resources in #1 to answer questions of the types in #2.

It can be understood that the Mathematica theorem prover is not  
connected in the current version of Wolfram|Alpha. Anyway, even when  
it will be connected, we are talking here about equational reasoning  
over real numbers, not really KR stuff.

--e.

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[John F. Sowa]

Bob and Enrico,

Bob, it's good to hear from you again.  I remember that project
very well, but we were really doing knowledge representation
and AI -- and so are the Powerset gang.  I agree with Enrico
that Wolfram Alpha is doing something simpler that could be
called "low-hanging fruit":

EF> It can be understood that the Mathematica theorem prover is
 > not connected in the current version of Wolfram Alpha. Anyway,
 > even when it will be connected, we are talking here about
 > equational reasoning over real numbers, not really KR stuff.

Stephen Wolfram explicitly said Mathematica is the basis for
the Alpha project.  But he also said that they're not doing AI,
at least not in the current version.  See his blog:

    http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/03/05/wolframalpha-is-coming/

Following is his short summary of their approach:

SW> Of course, getting computers to deal with natural language
 > has turned out to be incredibly difficult. And for example
 > we're still very far away from having computers systematically
 > understand large volumes of natural language text on the web.
 >
 > But if one's already made knowledge computable, one doesn’t need
 > to do that kind of natural language understanding.  All one needs
 > to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language,
 > and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations
 > one can do.

I'm sure that much of that computation includes equational reasoning
with numbers.  But he also says

SW> I wasn't at all sure it was going to work. But I'm happy to say
 > that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots
 > of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably
 > amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we're actually
 > managing to make it work.
 >
 > Pulling all of this together to create a true computational knowledge
 > engine is a very difficult task.  It's certainly the most complex
 > project I've ever undertaken. Involving far more kinds of expertise
 > -- and more moving parts -- than I've ever had to assemble before.
 > And -- like Mathematica, or NKS -- the project will never be finished.

Since Mathematica supports symbolic manipulation of nearly every
major mathematical system and since it also has a logic-programming
engine as the base processor, I suspect that they've implemented
a wide range of methods -- including what is usually called a
deductive database.  The borderline between that and what is
called knowledge representation is porous or nonexistent.

RS> You may remember that this is the sort of approach IBM ...
 > used in the mid 1990's...

That approach was closer to Powerset than to Wolfram Alpha:

  1. We used a parser that had been developed by Michael McCord
     (who retired from IBM a while ago, and his parser was released
     on IBM AlphaWorks).

  2. We were using conceptual graphs as the knowledge representation,
     and the IBM-CSLI verb ontology was based on the set of conceptual
     relations in the appendix of my 1984 book and extended for the
     2000 book.

  3. We were participating in the ANSI workshops on ontology and
     the Heidelberg workshop in 1998, which included a significant
     subset of the cast of characters that have been active in
     ontology circles for the past decade.

RS> IBM failed to see the value of the project and canceled it.
 > I had worked for IBM for thirty years, thought that was enough
 > and retired.  All of the people who worked on the project
 > eventually left IBM....  Martin along with Livia Polanyi were
 > original employees at PowerSet which was recently bought by Microsoft.

I am very well aware of all those developments.  And given all the
multimillions of dollars that Xerox, the venture capitalists, and
now Microsoft have put into what has become the Powerset technology,
one could say that IBM was justified in canceling the project.

I certainly wish the Powerset people well, and I'm happy for them
that they still have a job.  But I suspect that Wolfram will turn
a profit from their approach sooner than Powerset (now MSFT) will.

John


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[John F. Sowa]

Stephen Wolfram presented a "sneak preview" of the Alpha system
at Harvard on Tuesday.  The You Tube version has been posted on
the Harvard web site:

    http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2009/04/wolfram

For the first half hour, Stephen W. gave a demo of Alpha in action.
Like most demos, 5 minutes was good, 10 minutes was too long, and
30 minutes was boring.  But then he switched to Q/A mode, which
was much more interesting.

As the examples and the discussion indicated, the Alpha system
has a large number of templates for interpreting typical question
patterns by users.  Those templates are linked to Mathematica
_notebooks_, which correspond to Cyc microtheories, but with
everything represented in Mathematica notation and formalisms.

In the Q/A session, somebody asked for a comparison with Cyc, and
Wolfram said that Alpha is complementary.  Unlike Cyc, which was
designed for shallow commonsense reasoning about a broad range
of topics, Alpha is designed to do very deep computation about
many very narrow areas -- chemistry, medicine, geography,
finance, etc.

In effect, Alpha has a lot of special case ontologies specified
in the notebooks.  The only kind of common information is about
mathematics and units of measures.  The selection of a specific
notebook is done by the language templates and words.  Wolfram
noted that words can often be misleading, as in the case of a
person named 50 cents.

They plan to make the Alpha system available on the WWW later this
month.  There is an enormous difference between a demo with the
developer at the keyboard, and a blank screen where users can type
anything that comes to mind.  The test by actual users will be the
critical one.

John Sowa


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