This Will Change Things
May 4th, 2009 | Published in Internet, Technology | 2 Comments
A new search engine called Wolfram Alpha “takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet’s Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does”:
Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as “how high is Mount Everest?”, but it will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts.
The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out “on the fly”, according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in “10 flips for four heads” and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.
Dr Wolfram, an award-winning physicist who is based in America, added that the information is “curated”, meaning it is assessed first by experts. This means that the weaknesses of sites such as Wikipedia, where doubts are cast on the information because anyone can contribute, are taken out. It is based on his best-selling Mathematica software, a standard tool for scientists, engineers and academics for crunching complex maths.
“I’ve wanted to make the knowledge we’ve accumulated in our civilisation computable,” he said last week. “I was not sure it was possible. I’m a little surprised it worked out so well.”
I can’t wait to try it out!
May 6th, 2009 at 12:12 am (#)
Saw this post and wanted to pass along what seems to be the best look at Wolfram Alpha to date, from a demo at Harvard’s Berkman center.
Impressive, but I wonder how much the actual product vs. the hyped product will really change things. “A New Kind of Science” generated a lot of discussion for a while, and then fizzled out.
May 12th, 2009 at 9:24 am (#)
A long long long time ago I read a sci-fi short story about a man who kills his wife with an untraceable mixture of household chemicals. He found the formula by asking a computer “How to kill a blonde and leave no trace” or something like that, and the computer did all the searching and cross-referencing and came up with the answer. I can’t remember the author or the title of the story, but this sounds remarkably similar to that machine, which of course was almost unimaginable at that time except by forward-thinking sci-fi writers. Does anyone know the name of the story and/or the author? I’m thinking now that it may have been Vonnegut, but I may be making that up.