MetaFilter posts tagged with wolfram

Question the Answers? Answer the questions!

rollbiz — Fri, 15 May 2009 17:49:08 -0800

Wolfram Alpha is about to go live. Wolfram Alpha is an answer engine which may just change the way we think about search results.

Computable data* (conceivably knowable) about people

kliuless — Fri, 01 May 2009 06:42:19 -0800

Stephen Wolfram discusses Wolfram|Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine - at the same time Google Adds Search to Public Data, viz: "Nobody really paid attention to the two hour snorecast" -- like a cross between designing for big data and a glossary of game theory terms -- on Wolfram|Alpha (previously), yet the veil is being lifted nonetheless: "[on] a platonic search engine, unearthing eternal truths that may never have been written down before," cf. hunch & cyc (and in other startup news...) [via] *boiling it down to that which can be computed (about the world)

Wolfram|Alpha - the future of web search technology?

Foci for Analysis — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 14:17:12 -0800

Could Wolfram Research's (creator of Mathematica) Wolfram|Alpha be the future of web search technology?

But what about all the actual knowledge that we as humans have accumulated? A lot of it is now on the web—in billions of pages of text. And with search engines, we can very efficiently search for specific terms and phrases in that text. But we can’t compute from that. And in effect, we can only answer questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things up, but we can’t figure anything new out. [...] It’s going to be a website: www.wolframalpha.com. With one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms.

What does it actually mean? TechCrunch breakes it down:

It doesn’t simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google does, and it isn’t just a giant database of knowledge, like the Wikipedia. It doesn’t simply parse natural language and then use that to retrieve documents, like Powerset, for example. Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions — like questions that have factual answers such as “What country is Timbuktu in?” or “How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?” or “What is the average rainfall in Seattle?”

True Knowledge, launched in 2007, uses similar technology. Powerset, yet another competitor, was aquired by Microsoft in 2008 but has yet to live up to its promise.

Homework Helper

netbros — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:39:07 -0800

World of Science contains budding encyclopedias of astronomy, scientific biography, chemistry, and physics. This resource has been assembled over more than a decade by internet encyclopedist Eric Weisstein with assistance from the internet community. MeFi visited Weisstein's Mathworld a couple years ago.

Integrals!

Upton O'Good — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 11:35:43 -0800

The Integrator is Mathematica's integration capabilities, available over the web. Other online resources from Wolfram include Tones, an automatic music generator, and the venerable Mathworld, an extensive collection of math terms and theorems. (which, yes, has been mentioned previously.)

Music by computers

Sully6 — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 10:12:07 -0800

The servers are alive with the sound of music. Wolfram Tones takes patterns found out in the computer universe and converts them to completely original musical scores (which still may sound familiar, weirdly enough). Visitors to the site can then tweak styles, instrumentation and pitch (Phyrigian hexatonic, anyone?). Compositions can be saved, e-mailed or downloaded to your cellphone. Via.

The Secret life of Plants

kliuless — Wed, 21 Jan 2004 20:15:16 -0800

Emergent computation: Plants seem to do it! Does that mean we do three? [more here :]

nakedjon — Mon, 20 May 2002 11:16:42 -0800

Stephen Wolfram has finished his book, "A New Kind of Science," which purpotedly is being espoused as a paradigm shift in many fields. But, I'm starting to see a very reductionistic attitude in many of the main theorists of complextity theory and emergent phenomena. Is the idea that the Universe is in lines of code a phallus-extension/masculine overdriven idea? Isn't math a man made mapping and can the Universe be reduced to an equation by a man? Still this book is going to be groundbreaking. Read the following exceperpt from the wired.com article: q: "I've got to ask you," I say. "How long do you envision this rule of the universe to be?"
w: "I'm guessing it's really very short."
q: "Like how long?"
w: "I don't know. In Mathematica, for example, perhaps three, four lines of code."
link via protofunk.org, old similar thread

none — Sun, 27 Jan 2002 05:31:54 -0800

The End of equations? Paul Dirac and Albert Einstein thought equations were things of beauty, Stephen Wolfram, by contrast thinks they are antiquated.

mmarcos — Tue, 06 Nov 2001 14:05:49 -0800

MathWorld is back online. And what a nightmare the experience has been. (And still is? New entries now require filling out this permissions form.)

PWA_BadBoy — Thu, 04 Jan 2001 16:40:52 -0800

Stephen Wolfram [article from Forbes.com] could become the world's greatest thinker, or the world's biggest fool. Could he be the next Einstein?

costas — Wed, 29 Nov 2000 18:28:12 -0800

"One of the most esteemed documents of modern paleontology is Stephen Jay Gould's doctoral thesis on shells. According to Gould, the fact that there are thousands of potential shell shapes in the world, but only a half dozen actual shell forms, is evidence of natural selection. Not so, says Wolfram. He's discovered a mathematical error in Gould's argument, and that, in fact, there are only six possible shell shapes, and all of them exist in the world. " A must-read article.