Although it’s tempting to think of Wolfram|Alpha as a place to look up facts, that’s only part of the story. The thing that truly sets Wolfram|Alpha apart is that it is able to do sophisticated computations for you, both pure computations involving numbers or formulas you enter, and computations applied automatically to data called up from its repositories.
Why does computation matter? Because computation is what turns generic information into specific answers.
To give an amusing example, every school child has at one time or another written a report on the moon, and they probably included the wrong figure for how far the moon is from the earth. Why wrong? Because the distance from the earth to the moon is not constant: it changes by as much as a mile a minute. If you ask Wolfram|Alpha the distance to the moon, it tells you not only the conventionally quoted average distance, but also the actual distance right now, which can at times be well over ten thousand miles off the average. The actual distance is a figure that can be arrived at only by computation based on the moon’s known orbital parameters. It’s rocket science, if you will.
For a more down-to-earth example, consider the number of calories in a recipe. The underlying data are the calories per gram of each of the ingredients. But turning that generic information into the actual total calories for a specific recipe requires computation, first unit conversions (cups of flour into grams of flour, “one egg” into the default weight of a standard egg, etc.), then computation to multiply out the calories per ingredient and add them up. It may not be rocket science, but it sure is nice to have someone do the grunt work for you.
Each such computation requires a specific algorithm, and each of those algorithms has to be explicitly created. Of course many can be reused: units conversion or orbital mechanics, once implemented, can cover any unit or any planet. But nevertheless, enabling Wolfram|Alpha to do real, serious computations, covering a wide range of subject matters, required implementing literally tens of thousands of algorithms. Some are as simple as the quadratic formula; others are among the most sophisticated intellectual endeavors of our time.
The secret weapon that has allowed us, and no one else, to assemble such a vast library of algorithms, in such a diverse range of fields, is Mathematica.
Mathematica is familiar to scientists and engineers as the most powerful, most general tool for scientific computation, a role it has played since Version 1 was released in 1988.
Advanced Mathematica users appreciate that, aside from being an extremely powerful tool for one-off calculations, Mathematica is also a remarkably efficient programming language in which to implement complex algorithms.
The Mathematica symbolic language allows the user to express complex computational processes in a fluid, intuitive way, without having to worry about the ugly details of data structures, memory allocation, or confusing and inconsistent subroutine libraries. It is a language that feels very comfortable to subject-matter experts: people who know chemistry or economics, but not programming.
Mathematica’s language is uniquely powerful in its ability to represent data of all kinds using arbitrarily structured symbolic expressions. Mathematica programs are not restricted to working with a limited set of data types, such as arrays or strings: creating expressions that represent the logical structure of non-numerical data, or even expressions that represent other programs, is possible more easily, uniformly, and deeply than anywhere else.
The fundamentally symbolic nature of the Mathematica language allows an unprecedented degree of interoperability between different parts of the system, and between different algorithms and data sources.
As a result, the five million lines of Mathematica code that make up Wolfram|Alpha are equivalent to many tens of millions of lines of code in a lower-level language like C, Java, or Python.
Mathematica is a very tall starting point from which to begin building Wolfram|Alpha (or anything else, for that matter). While Wolfram|Alpha contains tens of thousands of original algorithms, it also makes use of a comparable number already built into Mathematica.
The algorithms built into Mathematica include some of the most sophisticated ever developed, and they cover not just mathematical computation, but the whole spectrum of logical, numerical, graphical, symbolic, and other computation.
What can you do with such a wealth of algorithms?
For example, if you give Wolfram|Alpha a mathematical formula, a polynomial say, or something involving sines and cosines, it will give you back a number of useful results: a graph of the function, a list of its zeros, factored and expanded forms, and more.
And it will give you the derivative and integral of the function you entered. Now, computing the derivative of an arbitrary function is a straightforward process, but computing integrals can be among the most difficult problems in mathematics.
The general symbolic integration algorithm in Mathematica alone represents hundreds of man-years of development work by the world’s top experts in automated integration. Wolfram|Alpha shares this algorithm, and as a result there is literally no place on earth where you can get more functions integrated than in Wolfram|Alpha (except, of course, our own older service, integrals.com, or Mathematica itself).
On top of this world-class algorithm, Wolfram|Alpha adds a very nice touch: a “Show steps” button that gives you a step-by-step explanation of how to arrive at the answer. This enhancement, like the underlying integration algorithm, is written in Mathematica language code, and it’s frankly hard to think of any other way it could have been done, given reasonable time and resources.
This is the essence of what has made Wolfram|Alpha possible. It’s not so much that it would have been impossible to do without Mathematica, but that it would have been impractically difficult. In fact, the easiest way to create Wolfram|Alpha without Mathematica would have been to write Mathematica first, then use it. Which is precisely what we have spent the past 23 years doing.
Wolfram|Alpha is in a sense the “killer app” for Mathematica. It is a chance for Mathematica to show off the astonishing range of things it is capable of doing when it is deployed, not against a specific problem, but against all problems.
Google uses a more sofisticated and most advanced technology- it is called as ‘Human Brain’. No other application as close to human brain as to our mind! Can’t beat it.
The Human Brain is slow, scattered, and most of all biased.
Now, now. How can you expect to rule the universe if you can’t answer a few unsolvable questions?
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Hello everybody,
After launching WolframAlfa, Google won’t stay watching, it will research and develop new ideas and technologies to keep itself giant information store!
Let us see.
I dont know. Wolfram have been leading in this particular field for a great deal longer than Google has. They’ll catch up, like they did with Yahoo and Microsoft. But it will be close.
I agree with Ischinger. I think this name “Wolframalpha is too long, or may be you are using Alpha temporary because this letter may refer to a development stage of software, I do not.
Good luck
Wolfram Alpha “Launching May 2009″ - Puzzzled what’s the final date to see it working….I guess May started…:-)
maybe the search bar should say “Launching Mayish”
Yes, try imagine the disappointment I felt when I clicked on that.
I wonder how NKS(”A New Kind of Science”) is employed in WA(Wolfram Alpha)?
I have posted all Top Thee Videos of Wolfram Alpha at my blog http://askwolframalpha.com click on by if you get the chance.
Lots of talk and noise around the this project. Can’t wait to see the real power behind it.
It will be nice to try out a new search engine with a new approach to how search should be.
As for the comment of by Roger saying “Google uses a more sofisticated and most advanced technology- it is called as ‘Human Brain’. No other application as close to human brain as to our mind! Can’t beat it.”
That is all well and good as long as you are one of the top percent of the population with a high IQ or a specific degree in your specific field of study but the average person, the uneducated person or the older or younger with diminished brain capacity or just ignorant of certain mathematical calculations or such will truly benefit from such a search engine that does all these mathematical calculations for you.
… am looking forward to this … even though it is already May 4th …
i wish wolframalpha good luck and success.
Will you be able to answer questions like: Which medium priced restaurant could serve us supper in time for us to catch the 7:30 showing of Star Trek at the cineplex? That’s the kind of information retrieval and analysis problem people face that would be great to outsource to a machine.
How start it? wath language can wolframalpha?
Aguardando o grande lançamento para poder desejar as boas vindas! Estamos anciosos.
“We’re making early access available to a few select individuals”. I smell failure. Closed, proprietary thinking will doom you regardless of how good your product is. Google or Yahoo or even M$ could emulate this so what do you offer? Be open. Give us something and you will be rewarded, shut us out and we won’t hang around.
You can not build up a website to millions of user in single day.. You need to scale it slowly, gradually.. that the better way to go.. think when gmail has launched..
i have heard lots about this project and am looking forward to seeing it launched soon.
If i ask for example “why elephants have big ears” how it is gonna handle that question and what will the answer be?
To keep cool. That’s in answer to you second question. How Wolfie will figure it out is beyond me.
It’ll probably say something like:
Elephants ears are “designed” to expel heat, having good blood flow through them, and as such need a large surface area is required to be efficient.
and point you towards more information on the subject…
A google killer? Possibly…if I ask a question to Google, then I must hope one of google’s search engines has come across someone asking that question, and, hopefully, an answer was provided…
But there are things Wolfram might not be able to do, such as a content based image search, perhaps I want a picture of an old lady smoking a cigar? Perhaps one of a breed of dog of a certain age? Would Wolfram/Alpha be able to do this?…I dont know, would it be able to give me answers based upon items in the news? Could it elaborate upon a Wikipedia topic?
why don’t you use a simpler name for non-English speaking countries? This name will just slow down the number of users from rest of the world.
It certainly does need a simpler name - sad though the requirement these days is, it will be significantly more successful with a simple name.
With it’s current name it seems to be targeting a scientific community, or perhaps that’s the intention - to give that impression of scientific superiority rather than call it something simple and subsequently popular.
This is the first good explanation I’ve read yet for WolframAlpha that doesn’t make it sound like cold fusion.
I do hope you plan to expose the ability for users to plug in their own algorithms and tap these data sources!
Why Google killer? The concept sounds fascinating. It seems to be google and wolfram both do very different things. You’re not going to find many websites through wolfram, are you?
People always try to make things compete against each other, I think the two services can co-exist perfectly together without the need to compare them in such ways.
In the case of yahoo and google it might be different because they more or less do the same thing, but wolfram seemingly is very different.
These really arnet my views, but the views of the hype surronding Wolfram/Alpha. The Dawn of Web 3.0 and all that…
no competition, no progress
Competition - how long before Google buys it ?
So it’s May 2009…hum-de-dum… When do we get to drive this puppy off the lot?
As well as a “show steps” feature for computations, I hope W|A (there’s a short name for you) displays its sources for more encyclopedic answers. I can’t see its gaining much acceptance else.
PS.
I’ve often thought it would be a good idea for civic planners to hold off laying footpaths until they’ve observed the ways people cut across the unpaved site. Perhaps that’s what the team is waiting for as regards the name issue?
What about …
Wolfra ?
Wolfie?
W|A ? — Are there any tonal pronunciations of the syllable “wa” in Mandarin which have appropriate positive associations?
…but after all this appetite whetting better make sure the team provides a demo soon, or the name “Waffle” might stick
god!
soo many negative comments:
“Google uses a more sofisticated and most advanced technology- it is called as ‘Human Brain’. No other application as close to human brain as to our mind! Can’t beat it.”
and:
“no competition, no progress”
You all must be geniuses to know, without trying or seeing that this is going to fail. Because of course as we all know we have learned all there is to learn, right?
No concept of science and it’s application.
Well I say good luck Wolfram, I hape it shows us a new way