Wolfram recently launched their new service for information retrieval. The service is, as far I am concerned, not a search engine – but a fact engine. And a very clever fact engine.

I am deeply impressed by the service, probably due to my awe for anyone trying to overcome the barrier of artificial intelligence (or close to it) – I certainly strive at not embarking on AI:)

In short Wolfram|alpha lets you ask a question, or provide some keywords and in return you get a set of facts that (the engine believes) are relevant according to the input. This looks fairly similar to what Google provides; enter keywords and get relevant results. However, the huge difference is that Google only provides documents that it does not understand, and it provides results which is believed to have some relevance which they might or might not have. Wolfram on the other hand provides you either with facts (which the machine knows) or they provide you with nothing. So the precision of the result is bound to be better (i think). However they do not know everything, actually very little (in the large sense).

There is much headlines which essentially is of the kind; “Google competitor launched”, “Wolfram takes on Google” etc,etc.

Well, are they competitors? I think no. Wolfram|alpha is for me an advanced (dare to say intelligent?) dynamic encyclopedia. A place where you know more or less exactly what you want and you get an answer – or not. Google on the other hand not a place where you get answers, you might even not know what you want (!) – it provides a way to navigate an enormous information space – but does not give you any answers.

In my opinion the two services are orthogonal. Both are very solid information retrieval services, but also very different, which differentiate them and make place for both. But that’s my opinion. Are the two services (direct) competitors? Will both survive the harsh climate of the internet?

Not going to elaborate further on this. All photos shot with 50mm f1/8 Nikon D60 by me, a pure amateur.

In yesterdays D2 magazine there was an article on children, computer games (specifically fps’). Worries on the relationship between school shootings and (intensive) computer gaming was the central theme. Of course a worrying subject. Although I can’t find any scientifically founded “proofs” of this relationship, I strongly believe that a deeper understanding of it is of importance – primarily to avoid, well, killing. (Although removing physical weapons – i.e. limiting killing enabling devices to a digital world, could also prove to be of success to minimizing school shootings..)

Well, I’m no expert at either school shootings, killing or computer games. But what I found very pleasing is the Immersion project of Robbie Cooper which essentially records video of people (youth) “as seen by the screen” when playing games. I find the technique truly inspiring. The video is absurdly illustrating the games ability to pacify, but also their ability to engage the player, although an engagement that I would characterize as a bit disturbing – although context and design of the video obviously emphasize this intentionally. Well, enough blabbering, watch it for yourself (w/ audio) – it is worth it.