The article makes some good points, but unfortunately is based on 0 firsthand knowledge. Yes, machine learning+semantic web "sounds like" like oil. But neithe

The article makes some good points, but unfortunately is based on 0 firsthand knowledge. Yes, machine learning+semantic web "sounds like" like oil. But neither of those technologies are very relevant to alpha. Yes, prolog had an algorithm for making deductions. But the point of alpha is not to make logical deductions, but to run computational models and analysis based on a vast dataset and human input. The idea that alpha "answers your question" is something that wolfram implicitly put out there in his blog post, but often its more like a computational version of wikipedia.. you enter an entity and visualization-heavy page is generated to explain and explore it. Hand-curating data and algorithms may sound silly to someone who hasn't built something as big as Mathematica, but the world of important/relevant data and algorithms is ultimately finite in size (if very large and complicated).