Doug Lenat - I was positively impressed with Wolfram Alpha

Semantic Universe Doug Lenat - I was positively impressed with Wolfram Alpha: "Stephen Wolfram generously gave me a two-hour demo of Wolfram Alpha last evening, and I was quite positively impressed.� As he said, it's not AI, and not aiming to be, so it shouldn't be measured by contrasting it with HAL or Cyc but with Google or Yahoo."

"There are two important dimensions I want to discuss about Wolfram Alpha, besides the remarks I've already made here. (1) What sorts of queries does it not handle, and (2) When it returns information, how much does it actually "understand" of what it's displaying to you? There are two sorts of queries not (yet) handled: those where the data falls outside the mosaic I sketched above -- such as: When is the first day of Summer in Sydney this year? Do Muslims believe that Mohammed was divine? Who did Hezbollah take prisoner on April 18, 1987? Which animals have fingers? -- and those where the query requires logically reasoning out a way to combine (logically or arithmetically combine) two or more pieces of information which the system can individually fetch for you. One example of this is: "How old was Obama when Mitterrand was elected president of France?" It can tell you demographic information about Obama, if you ask, and it can tell you information about Mitterrand (including his ruleStartDate), but doesn't make or execute the plan to calculate a person's age on a certain date given his birth date, which is what is being asked for in this query. If it knows that exactly 17 people were killed in a certain attack, and if it also knows that 17 American soldiers were killed in that attack, it doesn't return that attack if you ask for ones in which there were no civilian casualties, or only American casualties. It doesn't perform that sort of deduction. If you ask "How fast does hair grow?", it can't parse or answer that query. But if you type in a speed, say "10cm/year", it gives you a long and quite interesting list of things that happen at about that speed, involving glaciers melting, tectonic shift, and... hair growing.

GR: Lenat's analysis here is provides a nice overview of some of the issues involved in the intersection between search, knowledge representation and reasoning, and semantic web. Definitely worth reading all the way through.