Friday, June 5, 2009

Wolfram|Alpha Is Online

I've actually not been following the crazy hype around last months release of Wolfram Alpha, the "answer engine" of crazy and uncanny data. So, it wasn't until yesterday that I actually sat down and tried some stuff after a coworker showed it too me. It does some fun and crazy stuff. The way it selects and lays out data is pretty cool.

Anyway, after a few minutes, impressed, we decided that this thing must be evil, or at the very least dangerous. So I suggested we ask it if it was Skynet. It actually answered!
It "claims" not to be Skynet, citing the date of Skynet's activation (from Terminator 2) as the date of it's destruction and also saying how it, "enjoys interacting with humans." I'm sure. HAL 9000 enjoyed human interaction too! See what happened! Also, Wolfram conveniently ignores the fact that in the "new reality" of post-T2 events, Skynet turns out to be a distributed internet AI death program, so you be the judge.

Anyway, I started thinking about things and figured that we couldn't be the first ones to discover Wolfram's suspiciously Skynet intelligence, and as it turns out, we aren't.

EDIT: More funny stuff from Wolfram courtesy of Gizmodo.

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