There is another system

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on June 4th, 2009

The “computational knowledge engine” known as Wolfram Alpha has made quite a splash among eggheads the past few weeks. (We saw a couple online articles a few weeks back when it was launched and we heard an interview with the creator, Stephen Wolfram on a computer show on KFI in Los Angeles during a May 16 drive through the Mojave.)

It’s a fancy search engine and it’s being hailed as the next big thing. That’s right, it’s a thing… and it’s big. It’s supposed to out-Google Google by a factor of… a googol.

Anyway, we got a URL dropped into our inbox by FOS Aaron Ward (who, by this time, might be considered some sort of contributing editor) that linked to a page on Gizmodo that was titled, “Wolfram Alpha is actually a frustrated standup comedian.” The page contains a dozen or so examples of screen shots that resulted from some wiseguys out there trying to elicit wacky responses from the much ballyhooed search engine. Some of the responses are odd, some are funny.

Actually we concluded, after reading a few of the responses, that W-A isn’t so much a frustrated comic as much as he/it is merely subject to an extraordinary amount of… heckling.

That’s pretty much what the back-and-forth on Gizmodo reminds us of. “Audience members” throwing anything it can at the overly-hyped, bubble-brained know-it-all application, trying to get a laugh at its expense.

It also reminds us of how Mark Twain or other of his contemporaries might have felt when they brought their “act” to less sophisticated backwater venues in the days before radio, when the lecture circuit was one way of bringing the message to the masses. We have no doubt that Twain and others might have been besieged with a fair amount of taunts and wisecracks in an attempt to rattle.

In most cases, it seems, Wolfram Alpha did just fine. And we don’t anticipate any backlash from the even-tempered answer-bot.

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