Having spent some time with Grokipedia back in October of last year and written it up, I went back earlier today and took another look. It’s now V0.2. More significantly, it now has 6,092,140 articles. (Back in early November, it had 882,279.)
Here are some links that are worth a look:
- Jeff Duntemann
- Assembly Language Step-by-Step
- Turbo Pascal
- Free Pascal
- Pascal MT+
- UCSD Pascal
- Lazarus
- Modula-2
- Modula-2+
- Oberon
- Oberon-2
- Mesa (a programming language created by Xerox PARC)
- Sarah Hoyt
- Brian Niemeier
Wikipedia has an article on Edison Park, the Chicago neighborhood where I grew up. So does Grokipedia—but it’s not the same article. Grokipedia has much more detail, and was not copied from Wikipedia, as many of Grokipedia’s critics claim. Now, I found an error in the Grokipedia article: The northern boundary of Edison Park is not Touhy Avenue but Howard Street. A small enough thing, but if precision is required, will the AI be able to provide it?
I have a few quibbles with the biography Grokipedia posted of me; it made no mention of the 2009 third edition of Assembly Language Step-By-Step, and did not mention Carol at all. There was also some repetition about my projects like Cosmo the robot and my two home-made reflecting telescopes. I had hoped for a detailed bibliography like those on Wikipedia; no joy there. Those are gripes I found while I had my editor’s hat on, and in truth I’d rather have too much information in the piece than too little.
Although I’ve read the other articles in the above list, I didn’t put them under my editorial microscope. I was surprised at its mention of Modula2+ and Oberon 2, languages I’d not heard of before. Xerox in-house language Mesa has an article but its successor Cedar doesn’t. I did learn that there is a programming language called Haggis, for use in (where else?) Scotland. The lack of photos on Grokipedia continues, as I mentioned in my first post on the topic.
My conclusion? Grokipedia is the best AI of the several I’ve tried so far. I saw no gross AI hallucinations (like me being dead, sheesh) and significant topics are mostly covered. I didn’t read anything political and hence potentially biased; I was looking for programming languages and writers who are also friends, like Sarah Hoyt.
The research continues. I’ll post another pertinent entry here when I find something worth reporting.
