Stephen Wolfram is going live with his computational engine Wolfram Alpha this Friday, May 15, with an official launch on May 18. Tomorrow you can watch the launch live on Justin.tv but while you are waiting a screencast is available on the site.
Update May 15: Just spotted “Wolfram Alpha encounters ‘snag,’ launch could be delayed“
As the release date for Wolfram Alpha draws closer, I thought it would be a good idea to update my earlier post.
Yesterday Stephen Wolfram offered a sneak preview at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Two interesting articles are also available, one by Frederic Lardinois on a demonstration given by Wolfram on April 25 and the other a response to the Berkman Center preview by Larry Dignan.
And the question everyone seem to be asking is, will this replace Google? Well…
Is Wolfram/Alpha a Google killer? Probably not. Wolfram/Alpha’s approach, however, is notable and it’s easy to picture it being used in the enterprise. Wolfram’s demonstration could be summed up as an intersection between analytics and generic Web search. Wolfram/Alpha gets you an answer instead of pointers to potential answers. “It tries to tell us useful information based on what it can compute,” said Wolfram. ”The goal is to provide expert level access to anyone at anytime.”
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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.
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