Putting together the research principles and results contained in two major projects, Mathematica and A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram tries to solve a major issue, which exists since the apparition of computers: “one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer.” His new project is called Wolfram|Alpha and will be available as an online service, having the main purpose to compute the answers to various questions, as compared with a classic search engine.

For example, Google search engine provides the search results corresponding to a query made of a keyword or a key-phrase, by displaying related links to documents or web pages relevant to the query, but the search engine actually does not understand the question performed by the user.

Wolfram|Alpha project is a computational knowledge engine which uses algorithms for computing answers for users questions based on a large amount of data. Google is only a lookup system – it does not contain all the answers to factual questions.

According to Nova Spivack blog, Wolfram|Alpha will give you the answers which are not found on Google: “While Google only provide answers that are found on some Web page (or at least in some data set they index), a computational knowledge engine like Wolfram Alpha can provide answers to questions it has never seen before — provided however that it at least knows the necessary algorithms for answering such questions, and it at least has sufficient data to compute the answers using these algorithms.”

Wolfram|Alpha is not intended to replace Google or other search engine, because it only provides answers to questions based on computational principles and algorithms: Wolfram|Alpha does not perform a classical search into a database of indexed information. From this point of view, Wolfram|Alpha engine will not record answers to existing questions.

The computational knowledge engine will be launched in May 2009. The service will be available for large public from the official website.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 2:08 am and is filed under IT News, Tech & gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.