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Ask YC/HN: What Should I Ask Dr. Wolfram?

40 points by Mystalic ↗ HN
I'm interviewing Dr. Wolfram in a few hours, so I wanted to reach out to the HN community and see what questions you'd like to have answered, technical or non.

Most of my interview is going to be straightforward, but I'd love to throw at least one tech Q in somewhere.

26 comments

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ieatpaste
I would be interested in:

- if they're leveraging any new algorithms (categorical, semantic, or otherwise) and hopefully he could briefly explain the new ideas involved.

- any shifts in research and development regarding semantic search algorithms, semantic web and how Wolfram|Alpha plans to contribute to these trends.

- specific types of research information (DNA, relevant research information) and use cases for businesses (i find that the service is novel, but not particularly useful to businesses)

- how frequent they will be updating the existing data, and how frequenty they will be adding data

- shout out to U of I?

btw - can you guys focus more on the startups instead of how-to's? i miss the days when sites actually reported on new startups and not about gossip or top 10 lists.

Mystalic
I agree with you on the more startup reviews part. Part of it though is startups getting our attention - sending emails to news[at]mashable.com consistently work, since we read that account religiously. Also, weekends.
brg
Has ANKoS had the impact you envisioned? If so, what are the most significant results that have come as an outgrowth of its thesis.
vaksel
I'd like to know whose idea it was for hyping Wolfram Alpha as a Google Killer
paulgb
Did they, or did the press take that on all by themselves? I mostly avoided the hype about it so I could well have missed something, but the only article I saw quoting Wolfram as having said anything about search was miss-attributed. Most of the direct quotes seemed to downplay any comparisons to Google.
vaksel
yeah thats what I'm asking...was this their idea, their PR company's, or just the press chasing a story
paulgb
Ah, sorry. I thought you meant who within the company is responsible.
falien
I dont think I saw wolfram (the company) hyping alpha as a google killer anywhere, but all their material about it definitely over-hypes it for what it does right now.

Alpha definitely does some interesting things, but all the material I've seen from them is either complete fluff (we don't just index, we compute knowledge) or not anywhere near production ready (natural language processing). Also the part about having reviewed information becomes completely useless when they refuse to cite where specific information came from and instead cite a cloud of fuzzy sources.

sgibat
His take on the singularity might be interesting.
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moonpolysoft
Why does he insist on taking sole credit for most of the innovations of his employees and underlings?
alexitosrv
Yes, I also think he seems too much egocentric.
req2
Maybe Edison is his role model.
bravura
What living persons he admires.
Donald
Search is a particularly disruptive technology. Traditional search engines, e.g. Google, have made searching for certain types of information phenomenally effective. This has resulted in interesting privacy ramifications ("Google-stalking") and issues with research (easy access to bad information).

Wolfram|Alpha works by way of a new search paradigm: rather than simple data-mining it seeks to construct /new/ information based on a query. What do you foresee as the social consequences of a computational search engine?

barleyman
His Atlas of Simple Programs has excited me since I first heard mention of it. Now with Mathematica 7 and Alpha out, will there be a little more free time to take the Atlas to the next level?
fauigerzigerk
I gather that he employs lots of people to manually enter rules and factual information. If cellular automata are the foundation of all higher level complexity and even of the human mind, as he claims, why does he not build a learning algorithm instead?

My hunch is that his approach to knowledge engineering doesn't scale very well in terms of breadth and depth of knowledge and its rate of change. Not even considering very far reaching inferencing capabilities. Of course it's difficult to know that without knowing how exactly he does it. It's just a hunch.

ntoshev
Wolfram Alpha's relationship with Mathematica is pretty obvious, would he care to explain its relationship with NKS (he says W|A it's an offspring of both projects)?
Create
Is Mathematica a just clone of Macsyma?
Mystalic
Thanks everyone for your input. I'll be sure to post the interview hopefully tomorrow (well, technically today).
zouhair
When Mathematica will be freed?
noamsml
Ask him about the population of japan divided by the population of china in the year 2000.