An invention that could change the internet for ever

PC World had an article a few days back about a robot that had some software implemented on it in an effort to make it a Jeopardy champion someday -- same thing about understanding questions. Not sure if the two are related, however it's all very interesting

Thanks for sharing.... :red:

-JD

Good article. I am thinking - is this a threat or an opportunity to domainers?

My answer is that it is likely to be an opportunity as hopefully it will increase net usage even more. What do others think?

I think if it's a threat to anyone, I'd say it'll be a threat to Wikipedia :]

Pommy - The DN Doc said:

Good article. I am thinking - is this a threat or an opportunity to domainers?

My answer is that it is likely to be an opportunity as hopefully it will increase net usage even more. What do others think?

Click to expand...

Skynet is here....

Def interesting read. Threat wise I agree with Reece.

Skynet is coming.

Be afraid, be very afraid :D

Thanks for the link.

Pommy - The DN Doc said:

Good article. I am thinking - is this a threat or an opportunity to domainers?

My answer is that it is likely to be an opportunity as hopefully it will increase net usage even more. What do others think?

Click to expand...

It will be interesting to see how this works out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram

Bloggingheads.tv - A New Kind of Science Saturday

Thinking further than just the internet, this kind of technology may be extremely dangerous. The world could become what we have only yet seen in sci-fi horror movies. Imagine governments who put their trust in computers, and then they malfunction and set off nuclear missiles. But surely our politicians never make mistakes like that, do they ?

Samit said:

Skynet is coming.

Be afraid, be very afraid :D

Thanks for the link.

Click to expand...

agree :o

mindreading is already here in basic format
we all know how quick things move from the first steps
'Mind-reading' software could record your dreams - tech - 12 December 2008 - New Scientist

loads more articles like this

when this sh*t is in full swing its over
you cant even head for the hills. they have eyes

Wolfram Alpha has its uses, but doesn't appear ready to take over the internet just yet.

Great source for statistical and factual information though. Appears to have a deep database and a number of useful tools. That said it does not appear to be planning world domination at this moment.

For those that missed the launch, it can be found here:
Wolfram|Alpha

The more interesting tools can be found here
Wolfram|Alpha Examples

If you are developer oriented, and are interested in integrating wolfram alpha with your site in some manner, the api links are here
Wolfram|Alpha for Developers

Great online calculator. I love stats and I use limited statistical software so I will definately be using this in the future.

Domain needs rethinking to get universal appeal though. Too easy to forget.

Most searches relate to popular culture, pornography and easy-to-understand news items. This panders to none of them but it will change how I use the internet. Unless people suddenly stop caring about whether Britney is fat or not, I dont see how it will change the net forever though.

I took a look at Wolfram. Interesting, but the big problem they have is building their database. Google's uses entirely automated tools (spiders) to build its search database. Wolfram, however, requires lots of manual intervention and therefore huge staff to build the databases and maintain quality. For example, I put in a simple query that asks for "life expectancy". Received very good results. Then I refined it and asked for "life expectancy cigarette smokers" and received nah-nah. Google, on the other hand, gave me results, such as life expectancy reduced by 10 years for cigarette smokers.

I think Wolfram is a good idea, but probably needs lots of refinement in order to make it a large scale idea.

Rich

Apparently is a long range project with very ambitious goals. From their website.

"Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries."

The timeframes mentioned are years and decades. Apparently the plan is to hook it up to as many scientific and factual databases as possible and use that as a basis for interpolating data in new ways.

Very ambitious, obviously resource intensive project. It will be interesting to see what happens with it. They are providing api tools so it will be interesting to see what is done with them.

Whatever it is, seems likely to be very capital intensive. Should be interesting to watch.

Yes I asked the software some questions like when doomsday is coming etc It was showing me movie titles.

I read about this awhile back. Watched their videos, etc. They have a lot of Dell equipment.
It's a tad novelty, but I think claiming it will change the internet forever might be a little much.
I don't foresee it taking the world by storm like YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, or even Twitter to name a few that have actually changed the internet. It will grow though.
It is very good for stats. I'm sure the colleges, universities and number crunchers will utilize what it has to offer more so than most.

I think it has the potential, when/if the databases get deep enough. I can see the potential for applications to do some pretty cool results from datamining and applying formulas. Whether that effect will be visible on the first layer is debatable, but I can see uses for a centralized hard statistical based calculation.

Data mining is pretty important stuff commercially, if they can make that accessible to more people it will have some interesting ramifications on how useful the net is. I think its more important in terms of what it can provide developers than what it will provide surfers directly.

Of course, that all depends on them getting the infrastructure right and having sufficient information available to begin with. Huge project.

wow.....
sound interesting..... :D
thanks for sharing

Sounds cool. Now lets get that program implanted in our brains so we can just access information about anything with a single thought. ahh.. cyborg world here we come

yeah nice information if this could really be happen then its good deal for all of us.

thanks for sharing.

however after some time i spent at Wolfram Alpha, i found nothing close to what i want, google is better instead, maybe im wrong but thats what im getting at the moment.

wow..this is interesting..thnx for sharing

It sounds cool but I don't think it will be that functional like the article says..