Wow. This could be major:
"Stephen Wolfram is building something new — and it is really impressive and significant. In fact it may be as important for the Web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose...
"In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a 'computational knowledge engine' for the Web. OK, so what does that really mean? Basically it means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you.
"It doesn’t simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google does, and it isn’t just a giant database of knowledge, like the Wikipedia. It doesn’t simply parse natural language and then use that to retrieve documents, like Powerset, for example. Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions — like questions that have factual answers such as 'What country is Timbuktu in?' or 'How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?' or 'What is the average rainfall in Seattle?'
"Think about that for a minute. It computes the answers. Wolfram Alpha doesn’t simply contain huge amounts of manually entered pairs of questions and answers, nor does it search for answers in a database of facts. Instead, it understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions."
details: http://tinyurl.com/ctrpz3
background: http://tinyurl.com/d87ae6
I'll believe it when I see it. Read a discussion of this somewhere recently (wish I could remember but probably the Guardian or the like) and the reporter concluded that there is a lot of hubris. Wolfram put a book out a few years ago that was supposed to revolutionise sceince, or some such thing but met with very mixed views.
ReplyDeleteWhat does it mean to say: "Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions — like questions that have factual answers such as 'What country is Timbuktu in?' or 'How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?' or 'What is the average rainfall in Seattle?'"
"It understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions."
Computes? So it has the fundamental equation for understanding the universe?
Fancy Turing machine. Should be interesting.
ReplyDelete@Rick
ReplyDeleteI agree. This smells of snake oil.
According to its web site, it will be launched in May. I bet in June, the date will be September or the page will be gone.
Randy