Demo of a new kind of search engine
By adamg - 4/28/09 - 6:37 pm
Howard Melman reports on today's sneak peek at the Berkman Center of the Wolfram|Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine, which supposedly will be able to answer your questions, rather than pointing you to other pages on the Internet (so, in other words, like Ask Jeeves, if Ask Jeeves had actually worked).
He notes that when somebody asked what the meaning of life was, the Engine answered: 42.
Comments
42? Of course
Any nerd worth their salt would hard-code that answer into the engine.
No way
Any nerd worth their salt would encode the seeds of that answer into the data, so that the AI engine would be guided gently but inexorably to answer "42" on its own.
Real programmers use butterflies.