Wolfram Alpha Launches Tonight, On Camera

future.nerd tips news that Wolfram Alpha is set to be launched tonight at 8PM EST (00:00 GMT), and the entire process will be broadcast live, via webcast. Steven Wolfram said to PCPro, "We've been rather surprised that we haven't been able to find even a single publicly available record of the commissioning of any large website at all. So we thought we would document our own experience. We can't guarantee that everything will go smoothly. We fully expect to encounter unanticipated situations along the way. We hope that it'll be interesting for people to join us as we work through these in real time." In a related blog post, he explains how Wolfram Alpha interacts with Mathematica.

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is "Wolfram Alpha"? Couldn't the post at least give us ignorami a little hint about what it is?

Step by Step

[eddy_crim]

1. create complex new search engine type technology
2. create webcast of launch
3. announce on slashdot
4. fail!

I wonder why people dont create records of sites going live... perhaps its cos the poop always collides with the fan!

Idiots - exactly the wrong way to launch a website

[Sanity]

You can be pretty sure that this wasn't the idea of the engineers who built the website. The worst possible launch from an engineering standpoint is a high-profile one where your traffic spikes immediately on going live. The likely outcome is that your site goes down and all your PR effort results in nothing other than ridicule.

When I've been involved in launching websites I've always had to talk down the PR people from some kind of high-profile launch, to something as gradual as possible.

Re:Google Killer

[DragonWriter]

He specifically said it's not a google killer.

Well, people have said its not trying to compete with Google, even though its designed to do something better that people currently use Google for. They are either simply hoping Alpha won't to be compared to Google, perhaps for fear the comparison will come out negative, or they know what "compete" means.

It's sure to clarify one thing...

[Onyma]

I believe if this new computational engine comes online tonight the first thing it's going to define is a much better understanding of the term 'slashdotted'.

Re:Such confidence.

[NightRain]

They're doing a fantastic job of personalising it though. If you're interested in "geek culture" cred to build up an initial userbase to iron out the kinks, with professional usage coming at a later time, this seems like a good way to do it...

Re:Launch delayed, WolframAlpha hits a "snag"

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

And that's what I find very interesting: WolframAlpha gets to watch the calculations be performed by bright (and not so bright) people all over the world and see what ideas people are tinkering with. They could flag certain equations on the cutting edge and so on...

I'm not working on the cutting edge of anything, but what little bit I know about science and math leads me to think that progress is very rarely about coming up with new equations. Even if it was, and I was working anywhere near cutting edge science, I certainly wouldn't be typing my work into W/A so that Wolfram can run off and patent and/or scoop my discovery.