Yet, projects of this kind are not at all new to the market: Douglas Lenat’s Cyc and True Knowledge, LLC are just two of the most well-renowned “answer engines” in the market that Alpha will be competing with.

Wolfram|Alpha

Stephen Wolfram, a reputed child prodigy and the creator of the excellent Mathematica software for symbol manipulation, managed to keep this years-long project away from the eyes of the media up until March, when he finally announced in a blog post that his company would be ready to release Alpha later this month.

The Wolfram|Alpha homepage

What’s interesting about this project is that, in the words of its founder, it attempts to “create” knowledge by combining the various pieces of information in its databases, rather than returning closest matches from indexed documents from the Web like Google and all other traditional search engines do.

To achieve this, Alpha needed to develop fairly sophisticated language parsing algorithms in order to understand the meaning of user queries. Wolfram said that the set of parsing algorithms used was chosen from “the space of all parsing algorithms” and that, following that road, the team thinks it has made breakthrough advances in the field of natural language parsing, which is possibly one of the hardest subfields of artificial intelligence.

After parsing the queries, Alpha returns users information in an appealing form — often a graph — that allows for an easy comparison and analysis of the information contained in its databases across a number of domains.

Wolfram said that chemistry is probably the field that Alpha “knows more” about, while other bits of knowledge will be input by users themselves as they use the tool, similarly to what they would do on Wikipedia, except a) they will have to provide reliable sources and b) changes will likely not be reflected immediately in the knowledge base, but rather checked first by Alpha’s staff of domain experts.

However, the concept of “knowledge” in Wolfram|Alpha seems to be severely limited by one factor: by Wolfram’s admission, the project’s knowledge base doesn’t currently organize the objects into an ontology, which makes it impossible to make a very interesting kind of inference across its KB.

Can a can can-can?

For instance, lacking an onthology means not being able to answer questions like “is a pea a vegetable?”, or even one of my favorites: “can a can can-can?”, irregardless of the parsing capabilities that Alpha might have. In other words, all that Alpha really knows about the items in its KB is given through independent, domain-specific scripts, but it is unable to classify and organize the knowledge it collects in a meaningful way.

True Knowledge, LLC

True Knowledge is another interesting project that is both very similar and  very different from Wolfram|Alpha.

It is similar to Alpha in that it also aims to answer factual questions based on knowledge contained in its databases; but it is profoundly different in the way it gets there.

Unlike Alpha, True Knowledge does have an onthology, which means that it can answer a much wider range of questions even with a smaller knowledge base (see picture above). The user interface may not be as easy and the knowledge base not as well-curated as Alpha’s, but chances are that, without an onthology, Alpha will never be as powerful as True Knowledge.

Computing distances in natural language

This service is still in beta, but you can become a user (and contributor) by signing up on their website. Once you’ve been accepted, you can start testing the platform and even add new bits of knowledge in real time, in full accordance with the wiki spirit: other users can then corroborate or deny any previously assessed fact and lead the platform to believe a statement to be true or false with a certain degree of confidence based on all the evidence at its disposal and the inference it can make based upon it.

Finally, I find their approach to parsing quite interesting since, at least according to this Wikipedia article, TrueKnowledge “attempts comprehend posed questions by disambiguating from all possible meanings of the words in the question to find the most likely meaning of the question being asked.”

A final word

Using my status of web journalist, and being search engines one of my main focuses, I have just asked the staff of Wolfram|Alpha for a media preview of their platform. I’ve also asked them whether they plan to add an onthology to their framework anytime soon. I will post an update ASAP — stay tuned.

Maya Chichen Itza temple pyramid

The kind of progress and scientific discoveries made by the Maya civilization is quite impressive for their time, especially considering their isolation from neighbouring civilizations.

As with many other prehistoric civilizations, the Mayans’ concept of time was cyclical. They built a series of calendars based on naturally occurring cycles observed in the sky, such as a 365-day cycle that approximated the solar year, one to record the lunation periods of the Moon, and even one to track the synodic period — the time a planet takes to assume twice the same position with respect to both the Earth and the Sun — of Venus, which the Mayans managed to measure with surprising accuracy.

All of these calendars can then be synchronized and interlinked with one another, generating further and more extensive cycles. One of such composite calendar, the so-called Mesoamerican long count calendar, forms the basis for the belief that a cataclysm will take place on December 21, 2012, a forecast that mainstream Mayanists consider a misinterpretation.

Maya stucco glyphs in Palenque, Mexico.

According to the Popol Vuh, an important mythological book in the Mayan culture, we are living in the ‘fourth world’. The Popol Vuh describes the first three creations that the gods failed in making and the creation of the successful fourth world where men were placed on Earth. All previous three creations ended on a speficic date in the long count calendar, which will occur again on December 20, 2012, followed by the start of a ‘new era’ on the following day.

By following other clues within the Mayan culture, three experts have come to the conclusion that some worldwide cataclysm — e.g. a pole shift — was predicted by the Maya on the date the new era begins, a view that most experts in Mayan culture don’t agree with.

Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc., said to this matter:

For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle [...] To render December 21, 2012, as a doomsday or moment of cosmic shifting is a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.

The hype has also been alimented by reports by NASA that sometime between 2010 and 2012 we will very likely experience violent solar storms:

This week researchers announced that a storm is coming–the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one,” she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.

Some believe that, if the storms reveal to be strong enough, they could under the right circumstances black out the electrical grids of a few cities and fry satellites, even though there is no direct danger for humans as the Earth’s magnetic shield will protect us from the worst effects of such storms. Nothing apocalyptic, then.