[hypersoar]

I had a chance to see this in action a while back. While I, and none of the people I saw this with, were not at all impressed by NKS, this project blew our minds. We watched as it pulled up and manipulated everything from Egyption fraction expansions to historic weather data to the human genome. If the author of this article is exaggerating, it's not by a whole lot. While Wolfram may not be bringing about the revolution in science he hoped to, don't forget that he and his crew made Mathematica, and are very capable of creating impressive software.

[ryanwaggoner]

I want to believe you, but the fact that you signed up just to leave this comment anonymously doesn't do much to alleviate my skepticism.

[hypersoar]

Yeah, I know it looks suspicious. I've been lurking around here for a while, but hadn't really been compelled to comment before. I'm happy to try and answer questions about what I saw, but it was a while ago, so I don't remember the details that well.

[clevercode]

I'm very curious if, during this demonstration, you were actually allowed to directly interact with the system or not?

[hypersoar]

No, but he gave a pretty thorough demonstration, and took some requests for input.

[herdrick]

How limited was the input? Did someone type in whatever queries you guys asked?

[whughes]

Reminds me of the demo of Freebase Parallax: http://mqlx.com/~david/parallax/

The demo was very impressive, but in practice they just couldn't match the scope of Wikipedia or the wider Web. It may be the same way with Wolfram|Alpha.