Wolfram Alpha Architecture

http://highscalability.com/wolfram-alpha-architecture

by drp • 17 years ago

13 19 17 years ago

ulf• 17 years ago

Misleading title again, no really interesting details...

drp• 17 years ago

I thought the claim that they've created the 44th most powerful supercomputer to power their searches was rather interesting.

brown9-2• 17 years ago

Agreed. No new information here, and zip on the architecture.

sdfgfdgfd• 17 years ago

I dont get what walpha has to do with ankos. Is it just for the hype? I doubt walpha uses cellular automata to create the answers.

sachmanb• 17 years ago

im amused that the highscalability.com domain being linked to is not responding to my web request. timed out too many times. i'll heed ulf's comment and move on. if it's that good, i'm sure it'll come up 20 more times....

huhtenberg• 17 years ago

The interesting part of their article is a trivial rehash of this one:

http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/12/the-computers-poweri...

mojuba6• 17 years ago

His other web site he mentions here:

http://tones.wolfram.com/

is just pathetic.

I wrote a jazz improvization machine 18 years ago which played more sensible music some jazz fans even kind of liked, but it was as useless as this "new kind of" crap.

Music is an abstract language we, humans, speak to express ourselves. You can't touch hearts and souls by generating random sequences within a given scale.

I hope Alpha turns out to be more useful, but good Lord, this man's narcissism case should be included in psychology textbooks.

endtime4• 17 years ago

>Music is an abstract language we, humans, speak to express ourselves. You can't touch hearts and souls by generating random sequences within a given scale.

What if you randomly generated something that was identical to a famous piece of music? Is there a reason why that couldn't happen? And, if not, recognize that it doesn't actually depend on the prior human creation of the piece...so I don't see why, in theory, you couldn't randomly generate (or grow via GA or whatever) a good piece of music.

mojuba6• 17 years ago

Music is not just notes. With the exception of some of the modern genres (dance/electronica mostly) music is performed by people and truly good music has nuances not seen in the scores.

There are performances of Bach that I'd turn off after 20 seconds, and there are those I keep in my music collection for years, if not decades. Performaces differ dramatically.

Or take Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here - was it the scores, or rather Gilmour's unique articulation on the guitar that made us listen to this album? How about John Coltrane's emotional outbursts on the sax? Nina Simone's cosmic-deep vocals?

Music is a far more subtle art, not yet understood from the point of view of Cognitive Science. What random notes are you talking about?

jaydub• 17 years ago

For co-located servers who pays the energy bill?

wmf• 17 years ago

Usually the data center charges a certain rate for each circuit and the customer can consume as much or as little as they want (short of blowing the breaker).

Wolfram Alpha Architecture

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