“The knowledge graph is a vastly less ambitious project than what
we’ve been doing at Wolfram Alpha,” Wolfram says quickly when I bring it
up. “It’s just Wikipedia and other data.”
Google wants to understand objects and things and their relationships so it can give answers, not just results. But Wolfram wants to make the world computable, so that our computers can answer questions like “where is the International Space Station right now.” That requires a level of machine intelligence that knows what the ISS is, that it’s in space, that it is orbiting the Earth, what its speed is, and where in its orbit it is right now.
That’s not static data; that’s a combination of computation with knowledge. WolframAlpha does that today, but that is just the beginning. Search engines aren’t good at that, Wolfram argues, because they’re too messy. Questions in a search engine have many answers, with varying degrees of applicability and “rightness.” That’s not computable, not clean enough to program or feed into a system.
“We want to be right,” Wolfram told me. “Making the world computable is a much higher bar than being able to generate Wikipedia-style information … a very different thing. What we’ve tried to do is insanely more ambitious.”
It’s so ambitious, and so far-reaching, that it’s hard to describe. Wolfram says that of all the different things he’s done in his life, this is the most horribly complicated to explain. Remember, this is a man who has written on particle physics. It’s both intellectually deep and far-reaching, with many implications — “tentacles,” Wolfram calls them — into different areas of programming and science and knowledge and business.
There’s no good elevator pitch for the language, and even though it’s not entirely released yet, there are 11,000 pages of documentation already. In one of any number of nutshells, however, it’s a giant leap forward in building accessibility to the world’s knowledge, in making programs — and eventually things — smart.
- More Here on Wolfram language
Google wants to understand objects and things and their relationships so it can give answers, not just results. But Wolfram wants to make the world computable, so that our computers can answer questions like “where is the International Space Station right now.” That requires a level of machine intelligence that knows what the ISS is, that it’s in space, that it is orbiting the Earth, what its speed is, and where in its orbit it is right now.
That’s not static data; that’s a combination of computation with knowledge. WolframAlpha does that today, but that is just the beginning. Search engines aren’t good at that, Wolfram argues, because they’re too messy. Questions in a search engine have many answers, with varying degrees of applicability and “rightness.” That’s not computable, not clean enough to program or feed into a system.
“We want to be right,” Wolfram told me. “Making the world computable is a much higher bar than being able to generate Wikipedia-style information … a very different thing. What we’ve tried to do is insanely more ambitious.”
It’s so ambitious, and so far-reaching, that it’s hard to describe. Wolfram says that of all the different things he’s done in his life, this is the most horribly complicated to explain. Remember, this is a man who has written on particle physics. It’s both intellectually deep and far-reaching, with many implications — “tentacles,” Wolfram calls them — into different areas of programming and science and knowledge and business.
There’s no good elevator pitch for the language, and even though it’s not entirely released yet, there are 11,000 pages of documentation already. In one of any number of nutshells, however, it’s a giant leap forward in building accessibility to the world’s knowledge, in making programs — and eventually things — smart.
- More Here on Wolfram language
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