Template talk:Computable knowledge

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Inspiration[edit]

By the way, I figured I'd share here what was my inspiration to create this template: Stephen Wolfram's The Quest for Computable Knowledge is an extensive overview on the topic that mentions many of the entries linked from this template. Of course, most of these articles already delve into more detail than Wolfram's text, but it's nice to have a condensed overview of the whole timeline of developments. --Waldir talk 11:49, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

@Waldir: Stephen Wolfram's definition of "computable knowledge" is somewhat confusing, and it is the only definition that I was able to find. Is there any distinction between "computable knowledge" and other types of knowledge? Jarble (talk) 05:24, 23 July 2016 (UTC)
@Jarble: A simple answer to your question is: Yes, we can distinguish between computable knowledge and other types of knowledge. For example, implicit knowledge is not computable (see also tacit knowledge). As I interpret it, Stephen Wolfram's essay on the quest for computable knowledge is describing historical developments of information technology and knowledge management toward massive databases of machine-readable data combined with artificial intelligence that allows users to query the data with natural language or something very close to it and receive answers that a computer has already synthesized in a way that a human would have had to do alone in an earlier era. Here's a quote from Wolfram's essay: "There were some practical efforts to actually start working out how computable knowledge would be set up. Following up on crowdsourced projects like the assembly of the Oxford English Dictionary at the end of the 1800s, there were projects like the Mundaneum—which in particular tried to collect all the world's knowledge on 12 million index cards, and be able to answer questions sent in by telegraph. By 1945, Vannevar Bush was talking about the 'memex' that would provide computerized access to all the world's knowledge. And by the mid-1950s, the idea of artificial intelligence was becoming all the rage. In a sense artificial intelligence was thought of a bit like mathematics: the idea was to make a general-purpose thinking machine, that could start just from nothing, and learn and figure out anything, just like humans—rather than to make something that started from a large corpus of existing knowledge or methods." Biogeographist (talk) 12:59, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Timeline[edit]

In case anyone's curious, here's a timeline of the events in the template (maybe a log scale should be used instead?):

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  1. ^ Ars Magna (Ramon Llull, 1300)
  2. ^ An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (John Wilkins, 1688)
  3. ^ Calculus ratiocinator & Characteristica universalis (Gottfried Leibniz, 1700)
  4. ^ Dewey Decimal Classification (Melvil Dewey, 1876)
  5. ^ Begriffsschrift (Gottlob Frege, 1879)
  6. ^ Mundaneum (Paul Otlet & Henri La Fontaine, 1910)
  7. ^ Logical atomism (Bertrand Russell, 1918)
  8. ^ Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1921)
  9. ^ Hilbert's program (David Hilbert, 1920s)
  10. ^ Incompleteness theorem (Kurt Gödel, 1931)
  11. ^ Memex (Vannevar Bush, 1945)
  12. ^ Prolog (1972)
  13. ^ Cyc (1984)
  14. ^ True Knowledge (True Knowledge Ltd., 2007)
  15. ^ Wolfram Alpha (Wolfram Research, 2009)
  16. ^ Watson (IBM, 2011)
  17. ^ Siri (Apple, 2011)
  18. ^ Knowledge Graph (Google, 2012)
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