Welcome to the Wolfram|Alpha Blog
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Our teams are working hard to meet our goal of having Wolfram|Alpha ready for you in just a few weeks.
Since Stephen Wolfram’s initial announcement, we’ve had the opportunity to show Wolfram|Alpha to some of the thousands of you who contacted us. Many interesting questions surfaced. We plan to use this blog to address those questions and the many more we expect you’ll have as you think about how you too can use Wolfram|Alpha.
We’ll also let you know about upcoming events around Wolfram|Alpha—like the first public preview that Stephen is giving this afternoon at Harvard Law School. Information on participating in the webcast and Q&A can be found here.
Finally, we’ll use this space to talk about ourselves, giving you a peek into our world, what we’re working on, what we’re thinking, and what you can expect from us as the stewards of this project.
So what is Wolfram|Alpha? To begin, we’ve named it a computational knowledge engine.
The heart of Wolfram|Alpha is a computational engine able to draw on terabytes of curated data and synthesize it into entirely new combinations and presentations. The stock of systematic, structured data in the world is vast, but finite, and the efficient processes developed for Wolfram|Alpha have allowed us to make real progress towards the goal of incorporating all of it.
Our overarching goal, the “higher purpose” of this project, is to make all computable, factual knowledge available to everyone. What Wolfram|Alpha does is compute on top of those facts—answering questions, solving equations, providing insights, projecting future behaviors, and more.
We believe the result is an extremely powerful way of harnessing the world’s knowledge and making it possible for anyone to benefit from that power.
Now, that said, Wolfram|Alpha doesn’t yet have all the systematic, structured, factual information on the planet, just a good start at some of the data—including that likely to be of high priority to professionals in various fields like chemistry, physics, biology, or engineering.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll start to share a few of the many uses of Wolfram|Alpha with you, and at launch, the product will be yours to explore. We’re certain that you can find innumerable ways to use Wolfram|Alpha, and we look forward to hearing about this.
We approach this project with a long-term horizon, a 20+ year timeline. We believe Wolfram|Alpha is always going to be a work in progress. And we’re going to be relying on you, our community of users, to point us in the directions of highest priority.
Many of the questions we’re getting right now have to do with the fidelity of our data and our ability to ferret out and relay truth. In a subsequent post we’ll talk quite a bit more about how we’re considering this task and the steps that we are taking to ensure that Wolfram|Alpha delivers on its promise to democratize knowledge for everyone. And we look forward to your feedback on that front as well.
In the meantime, please take the time to follow us on Twitter, join us on Facebook, or grab this blog’s RSS feed. Again, your participation and feedback is going to help us shape Wolfram|Alpha for years to come, and we thank you in advance.
As Hugh McLeod has said, “The market for something to believe in is infinite.” We are very thankful for all of your interest thus far. The number of you who are willing to believe in what we are building has been a real inspiration to us.
Welcome aboard this great adventure with us!
Looking forward to trying out alpha first hand! One question that I know a lot of people would like to know will it have an API?
Great work.I am from Bulgaria, Varna.Congratulation!!!
Congratulations! Simply Stunning. Have been waiting a long time for this. Alpha is more than a product it is going to become a Game Changer. The mind of Stephan Wolfram never ceases to solve questions and equations of the human existence. While, in academia I used Mathematica extensively in Clinical Trials Analysis, and as fate moved me to online marketing, I was shrewd enough to use this great tool for higher level analysis. At SiteMagnify, I believe we are one of the few online marketing consultants to use Mathematica for statistical analysis, for paid search and seo keyword traffic/quality correlations.
I look forward to the day in the near future were I can use Alpha exclusively to both search and solve questions. Thank you again. The general populace has no idea yet how indebted they will be for this great leap forward. Cheers. SiteMagnify,
Saw the talk, looking forward to trying it out.
Keep on keeping on!
That’s certainly ambitious, and apparently certainly possible. I was interested to note the four cornerstones of the project did not include explicit reference to automated reasoning … can WolframAlpha conclude that “Socrates was mortal”, given that (I assume) it knows “All men are mortal” and “Socrates was a man” (and of course more complex reasoning requirements)? Right now we’re interfacing the SPASS automated reasoning system to large amounts of external data, in order to provide deep reasoning with access to large knowledge bases.
I am really proud to live in these interesting and historic times! Please continue with this great work - it will change the world to the better!
Holger
Congratulations. What you are doing is important and significant, both technologically and in terms of sharing and advancing human knowledge. Best wishes for your success.
Hello, first of all sorry for my bad English, I could see only a few minutes, the presentation at Harvard Law School, (I lost the link and I am not longer able to connect), but so is enough to be fascinated by the genius and from work done by Stephen Wolfram and his group. Wonderful! Are enthusiastic in its potential. I can not wait to experience it personally.
There is nobody who knows how to review the entire video of the presentation?
Hi and greetings from Italy.
You have a dream and one day it is going to work.
Just like everybody else here I can’t wait to give it a spin, I wonder what effect your project will have on the SEO world?
Googles’ mantra “do no evil”, it will be interesting to see how this phrase develops in Wolfram?
EQ over IQ
All the best on this voyage
Looking forward to seeing it. I suggest you try to communicate the product a little better, in a simpler way. It all sounds very interesting, but you need to sell it better to all of us. Post a video of it working. We all really want to see it work.
I’m looking forward to trying your conceptual knowledge engine my self. I hope my excitement whilst following your updates will be as cool when I get my hands it.
Good Luck
Would have been good, if the Videographer from Havard would have shown the Demo-Screen more often. I assume the demo screen was more interesting than Stephen’s face ;-)
Does Wolfram|Alpha works (benefitS-riskS blanceS) and what is its recent limitations (results of pilot phaseS)?
To what extent is Wolfram|Alpha evidence-based?
What are the potential effect modifiers of the comparative benefits and harms of Wolfram|Alpha?
To what extent is Wolfram|Alpha democratic, transparent and heterogen?
What are the indirect costs of Wolfram|Alpha?
Moniem Mukhtar
Good work Stephen. I hope the project will be a success.
All the best with the project.
Now, if we can just link up the best ideas about learning and education with instant access to precise knowledge we might start realising our human potential - despite our human natures…
Can i suggest merely from a marketing perspective that you change the name from wolfram alpha to the answer engine. don’t search, answer. Best of luck with the launch
Hello, i,m from spain, my question is if this service will work also into the spanish(from spain) even if i could work for you as help for some things like translating would like to know, any sugg. is wellcome, thx a lot for this job, so as long i can und. this may be a good chance for me to replace google wich since they become 1goal centered they are messing their first purpose and since does not work prop. on their results, what a pitty for them and what a chance for you!, thx again greatings from spain
I would like to hear about the relationship between Wolfram|Alpha and the Semantic Web, if any.
Thanks, and good luck!
– Jack Krupansky
I am really interested in seeing how this impacts more traditional search engines. What I am most curious about is to see whether it gains traction with the general public. I think it is likely many folks would rather see a list of related documents (ala semantic search) rather than trust an algorithm to provide a single answer to a query.
A secondary interest I have is in seeing how (if) Wolfram Alpha will be monetized. Any plans for that?
I can’t wait to see how it works. Best luck for the launch!
Congratulations….
we are witnessing an important step that will lead us to that future described in the Asimov´s books.
Peace
Xtaz
Congratulations on an absoutely pivotal application. Now we are getting somewhere!
The promise of this knowledge engineering effort is enormous. I look forward to participating in the execution and evolution (You’re right, it must always remain a work in progress in order to survive - perhaps a nickname: “Knowledge Shark” - simultaneously mover, seeker, eater?)
What a wonderfull aplication, i hope that it will be also translated to spanish :)
Just curious to know if the knowledge base will extend to the field of computer science and in particular software development.
I can’t wait your ambitious project being started. Good luck, though - and best regards from Switzerland.
The whole thing seems to be very promising. Waiting for the launch. Good luck.
I could only get the audio, but it was very interesting.
I wonder if it would be possibile to interface with scripts, whereby answer(s) from one question feed into the questions at the next stage. Obviously, the answers would have to be formatted sensibly (a single value/array).
Two points:
(1) why is there no open beta?
(2) for those who want a more understandable explanation of how this thing works, I’ve come up with…
a Google search and a Wikipedia output.
Comments?
This is really Impressive, I love to see this in action.
Mani
Can’t wait to see W.alpha in action. Careful with all those offers of translating it into Spanish (of Spain[sic]) by eager “translators”. Use only professional translators (from the UN or similar organizations). Best of luck! Cheers!
I applaud Dr. Wolfram and the whole team. I hope I can be of help.
could Wlfram Alpha be better than google i am dying to try it
May you have a spectacularly successful release!
May you correctly guess the magnitude of response within a factor of 10.
May you have infinite patience in dealing with the public.
May you nevertheless have the sense to ignore the thousands of people who complain that it didn’t work the way they wanted it to with nonsensical or inappropriate input.
May you use good judgement (please!) in the ads you permit to share the page with Alpha.
Most importantly, people who type in “What is the meaning of Life (, the Universe, and Everything)?” or similar questions should receive precisely the same response as Deep Thought gave in the HitchHiker’s Guide, namely
“Tricky…”
(It wasn’t until 7.5 million years later that it gave the answer “42″.)
Can’t wait for launch. I’ve very high expectations ;)
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