"The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet's Holy Grail â a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does." http://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...uld-change-the-internet-for-ever-1678109.html "The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out "on the fly", according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in "10 flips for four heads" and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out." ------------------------ So basicly any newbie instead of coming here and begging for a profitable trading system and being at the mercy of oldtimers just can type into the searchfield "profitable trading system yielding 40% annually" and trade away gracefully. This software is probably able to tell you "where the Dow will be on June 27th", if you ask it nicely...
better yet type in ' send free money without any string attach' along with your bank account number to collect the deposit automatically.
One can also type: a) How to turn $1,000 into $10,000,000 in less than 300 days b) How to find a profitable trading room or service that will make you a millionaire
Focusing on the actual technology, I am thinking: --- I will believe it when I see it --- my minor (did an MS-CS major) was artificial intelligence. The problem they are trying to tackle is immense. GIGO applies - the web is full of garbage, trying to make sense of it is incredibly difficult. And having their own databases may turn out to be a lot harder than they think. Doug Lenat worked on a huge AI system that was supposed to bring together all critical human knowledge into a uniform repository, working on it for many years, and nobody hears about it any more. --- The Segway was called "it" - it would change us forever. Of course, almost no one owns one, and it is expressly disallowed on sidewalks on many cities.
Completely Agree... Sounds a lot like AI... computer generated intelligence... We are always just almost quite there with AI but never there... HAVE STOP <img src="http://www.enflow.com/p.gif"> WILL TRADE
Ugh... If you want a glimpse at the next generation of web search read up on this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_web This is the true web 2.0 IMHO, not socializing an app, or giving it tagging/taxonomy. There are already companies/groups that are making use of the semantic search concepts that you should be hearing about soon enough. Example searches like: "Who was older in 1982, John Edwards or John McCain" The idea is that the engine will know to look for meta data for each of the two persons birthdays, it understands this is a comparison query (which of the two persons is older), and that there is the year in which to base from (1982). Of course even still you need to describe what you are doing even with natural language. It will in all likely ask you to refine your query even more, "John McCain the politician? or John McCain the ...?" Stuff like that. AI would certainly not know what to do with queries like, "How can I make money quickly." However, we may be able to query financial data like, "Show me a grid of US stocks symbols that have a market capitalization of 100mm or higher and an EPS that is lower than 10. Return the top 200 results sorted by EPS ascending." Sure you can do this with specialized software today, but imagine typing this into google, and having google understand it.
Actually, Google is already using similar methods, you can type full questions into the searchfield... Here is a video of showing Worfram Alpha's abilities: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYhLsQPHNas
I would disagree. A close friend worked on one aspect of AI at our university here (his area of interest was imaging, but he was in the same lab as the rest of the guys who were deeply interested in the pure programming side), and he made it clear that those in the field understand it will be a long time before we have anything resembling a real thinking machine. The term AI has become part of the popular vocabulary, but in 500 years, they'll look back at 2009 and 2019 and see us trundling along on a marginally upward sloping path, nowhere near the 'almost there' stage when the curve explodes upwards.