Billed-as Ultimate Search Engine...

From: Woodcock <EVSmalley_at_blackthespam.earthlink.net>
Date: 2000/04/27
Message-ID: <8e8v3p$k4f$1_at_mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>#1/1


        

I think I may need a reality check on this. Anyone?

Wired mag, 2/00 "The Quest for Meaning": This article pretty much convinced me that a piece of software I've never heard of is going to end up running the world 5 years from now, which, when I take a step back, seems unlikely.

Did anyone else read this, or has anybody used this Autonomy Systems software? The gist of the story is that the real currency of the Internet and the Internet Age is so-called "unstructured data", which just means text in various formats on various topics. But the problem is that even though this text is what humans want and need from the Internet, computers don't really know what to do with it, and we have to tell them, which defeats the purpose of the whole thing. Computers are good with numbers and formalized programming languages, but they don't know how to read a magazine article and know whether you'll like it.

And so now according to the article the company Autonomy has changed all that, by using a hundreds of years old algorithm to give the skills of, quote "comprehending context, generalizing from words to an idea, even understanding the unspoken by grasping the root concepts beneath the play of syntax." And so supposedly the software can read anything in any language (without actually knowing what the words mean) and link paragraphs in one document with most closely related documents from its source (which could The Web, or The Company's Complete Knowledge Record). And the implication is that this all works well enough that it can take the place of human beans doing the same work.

The article suggest that these people are the only ones with a product that can do this and it quotes the CEO saying they're on the way to becoming "the Oracle of unstructured information." Meaning, they'll be everywhere.

If somebody could point out the flaws, catches, and exaggerations so that I can go back to my normal life, that'd be great.

  Edward

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Received on Thu Apr 27 2000 - 00:00:00 CEST

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