Wolfram Alpha is coming…
Do you ever just want to ask factual questions of your favorite search engine and have it compute answers for you? Well soon you might be able to do just that.
Stephen Wolfram received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech in 1979 when he was 20 and in 1988 created computational software that has become the standard in its field, and went on to focus on cellular automata and complex systems.
In May he is planning to release Wolfram Alpha. And what is so exciting about this? Well, according to Nova Spivack…
Wolfram Alpha is a system for computing the answers to questions. To accomplish this it uses built-in models of fields of knowledge, complete with data and algorithms, that represent real-world knowledge.
For example, it contains formal models of much of what we know about science — massive amounts of data about various physical laws and properties, as well as data about the physical world.
Based on this you can ask it scientific questions and it can compute the answers for you. Even if it has not been programmed explicity to answer each question you might ask it.
But science is just one of the domains it knows about–it also knows about technology, geography, weather, cooking, business, travel, people, music, and more.
It also has a natural language interface for asking it questions. This interface allows you to ask questions in plain language, or even in various forms of abbreviated notation, and then provides detailed answers.
The vision seems to be to create a system which can do for formal knowledge (all the formally definable systems, heuristics, algorithms, rules, methods, theorems, and facts in the world) what search engines have done for informal knowledge (all the text and documents in various forms of media)….
Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain. It provides extremely impressive and thorough answers to a wide range of questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers, it doesn’t merely look them up in a big database.
In this respect it is vastly smarter than (and different from) Google. Google simply retrieves documents based on keyword searches. Google doesn’t understand the question or the answer, and doesn’t compute answers based on models of various fields of human knowledge.
While Wolfram is a somewhat controversial figure and he emphasizes the complexity of what he has undertaken, this is certainly something to watch. For more information…
