Who is HAL?

A few interesting news stories. First, IBM is building a robot to compete on Jeopardy. Pretty neat, because the Jeopardy questions are pretty tricky to comprehend. As the article pointed out,

The real difficulty, Dr. Nyberg said, is not searching a database but getting the computer to understand what it should be searching for.

The system must be able to deal with analogies, puns, double entendres and relationships like size and location, all at lightning speed.

Which brings me to my second news story. Wolfram|Alpha is launching soon, and there's a little review/explanation of it here. (Apparently there is also a "sneak preview" at HLS today -- wish I could go.) Like the IBM Jeopardy computer, Wolfram|Alpha is supposed to answer your questions with a bit more context than the standard Google keyword search. It also apparently is better at presentation than just presenting you with a list of links. As the article explains,

Where Alpha exceeds, is in the presentation of its "search" results. When asked for how many internet users there are in Europe, for example, Alpha returned not just the total number, but also various plots and data for every country (apparently Vatican City only has 93 Internet users).

I'm not sure how generally useful it will be, but I think it's a good idea and a step in the right direction -- we really need more than the keyword-search functionality that is basically all most search providers offer.

One thing that I'm kind of interested in how often Alpha's database, which apparently comes from "a vast repository of curated data from public and licensed sources," is updated (and how automated the updating is). The article didn't really address this. If there were 93 internet users in the Vatican City back in 2006, and that's the most recently available data, that doesn't really tell us anymore useful information about the current state of things than Google would. And it seems like if the updating isn't automated, keeping the search engine going would be a pretty big task. But it will be interesting to see how this turns out.