My current entrepreneurial endeavor is fundamentally based around developing algorithms that require what would be considered “advanced” computational power in the form of linguistic and multivariate, unstructured data sequencing. Seeing that I’m linguistically-oriented in this venture, it bothers me to no end with the lackadaisical utility of sophisticated terms, such as, “computational linguistics”, “semantical parsing”, and a whopper, “computational knowledge engine”.

So you might be aware of Stephen Wolfram (wolfram.com). I follow him on Twitter. We are “facebook” friends. And I like his applications and utilities (I’m addicted to Mathematica). HOWEVER, I hold him responsive for the cheap ploy being utilized through his latest creation, Wolfram Alpha. Now let me introduce myself. I am a “Wolfram/Alpha Community Expert” in the fields of Physical and Computer Science. I applied when this was being billed as a great leap forward in both the semantic web and computational linguistics (being a vital function in the digital vacuum representing by their planned data harvest).

The let-down took place upon receiving my confirmation of being an “expert” and the follow-up questions… “to help ‘train’ the ‘engine’”. Here is an example of the questionnaire: a) What is a byte? b) What is a motherboard? …

This forced me to re-read the website…
Making the world’s knowledge computable. Today’s Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. Enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and a growing collection of data to compute the answer.

Ahem.  This (in its present form) doesn’t have anything to do with how it was originally marketed. This is not about advanced
computational linguistics… this is about a carbon-based life-form offering the answer to a question. This isn’t about formally priming a neural network. The algorithm is a basic search function on an index (Q/A). This is the same model offered by the old, now defunct, “people driven” search engine (Laa-laa, I think). This is a wiki-project masked as an exercise in complexity!!!

My current theory is that people are so freaking guillable and ignorantly dependant upon science and technology as to accept any polysyllabic marketing piece as “advanced, so it must be true”. Obviously, I was a party to this particular illusion (at least until becoming an “expert”).