Stephen Wolfram : Founder of Wolfram Alpha
A new web tool ‘Wolfram Alpha’ would be on display from the start of May and which experts believe would have the capability to rival Google as the premiere knowledge machine. The technology known as Computational Knowledge Engine would be available to the masses from May, 2009.It’s totally different from Google, since rather than displaying web pages it would directly answer the query in real time. The free program aims to answer questions directly rather than display web pages as response to a query like a search engine.
“Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime” said Dr. Wolfram at Harvard University.
How it Works:
The tool computes many of the answers in live feed from publicly accessible and licensed data bases, along with any live feeds such as share prices and weather reports. Dr. Wolfram also said that trillions of pieces of data were chosen and managed by team of experts at Wolfram Research.
‘Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain, it computes answers – it doesn’t merely look it up in a database’ says Novak Spivak (founder of Twine).
The tool would be using ‘Natural Language Processing’ which would enable users to ask questions in spoken English as oppose to specific search terms. i.e. who was the founder of India. Answer would be Gandhi.
However there is still lack of spoken English by users on the internet, whereby they tend to write in short forms i.e. Founder Pakistan or US War etc. ‘Pretty soon they get lazy and don’t want to use all those words’.
What will it answer?
The web tool would be able to answer simple questions like ‘the height of Mount Everest’ or crunch statistics and databases to answer country’s GDP etc. Besides the web tool would be able to solve complex mathematical equations, plot scientific figures or chart natural events.
‘Like interacting with an expert, it will understand what you are talking about, do the computations and then present to you the results’ said Dr. Wolfram
It is expected that it would mostly be answering scientific queries and to some extend cultural queries i.e. about movies and pop-stars.
Future Outlook:
At present it seems to be an ingenious tool. But it might find some linguistic hurdles at the beginning as the ‘Natural Language Processing’ might not be able to fully evaluate the query. None the less it seems like a great tool and remains to be seen whether it would be able to rival Google in the coming years or not.
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Wishful thinking at this point in time.
I am currently involved in research regarding phones and phone history and features etc, so this has been useful.
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