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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!
I think its amusing that we have a Blog about something that isnt available yet….sounds rather Zen to me…
I’m having trouble streaming today’s sneak preview. Will a video for it be available for download later on?
The Live Question Tool (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/questions/WolframAlpha) on Harvard’s site had a note about it being posted after the talk. We’ll pass along the link as soon as we have it. Thanks!
Much needed innovation. I am hoping this will make a significant impact in people’s life who are searching for answers in the information universe!
I am very excited by the imminent release of Wolfram/Alpha as pioneering innovator in the dissemination of ever expansive storehouse of human imagination, knowledge.
A great big thank you for what I heard on the webcast: That Wolfram Alpha will make expert knowledge available to all of us. Some of us are not *yet* experts.
Waiting for release date!!!
Hope it will give the impact that I aspect.
I am interested in seeing the beginnings of the project!!!!
You guys need to hurry. Can’t wait anymore. I feel like a sixteen years old kid waiting for his first date….
Very exciting times! Can’t wait to try this in it’s relative infancy, and then compare in a year..
Congratulations . . . this looks to be a very exciting resource.
It’s nice to see you have recognized that this will be a work in progress and have established the 20+ year timeline. Hope it doesn’t stay in beta that long though. Looking forward to it.
History repeats itself. This search engine should find it easy to source future events and that will be the proof in the pudding for me.
job,,,, well done Tim!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! you made it…..such a splendid engine ever made…. cant wait to taste d sugar of it…love it…mates…!
Likewise very excited to get my hands on this… hoping it’ll be expert, or become expert, in photography, among other things. So nice to see an are of AI bear fruit actual run of the mill people can get their hands on!
Wolfram can say whatever combination of words as desired. It means nothing until he product is delievered. It means everything if it toppled Google!
Looks promising…. I will love to try it and see it evolve fast….Not asking for much??…..GREATE THING best look..
This will be very interesting for students and teachers. We are all very excited by the imminent release of Wolfram Alpha
I can’t wait for this! Wolfram|Alpha sounds as if it has the ability to help with problems that cannot be solved with Google. Keep up the good work! I look forward to the fruits of your labor.
Best of luck to the team. Can’t wait to see the results.
It’s the most ambitious project I ever heard. I just can’t wait to see it live. Give us some screenshots please 🙂
Could Alpha someday do some scientific research on its own by integrating information and concepts from other people’s research?
One example: It seems that some of the research related to gravitational frame shifting may also be relevant to detecting gravitational waves —
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0408097
http://arxivblog.com/?p=1279
Computers wouldn’t come with the same presumptions as humans. They could make surprising discoveries. Yes, I know some humans found some parallels between the two phenomena; but there may be a few connections to other phenomena that would seem very odd in a human cultural context.
Well, I am hoping to see it also useful to theologians. I’m just sayin’.
AMR
Can’t wait! I looks like it will work really well. If it does, it’ll be a serious step forward in the evolution of the internet.
Had difficulty logging in today. Please send or post a link to the archived video if possible. thx
A search engine of the type you’ve developed is way over due. With great marketing and press, I hope you torpedo Google out of the water. My only hope is that you won’t cave in too quickly to their invariable offer to buy you out.
I published a short article on my blog about the launching of Wolfram|Alpha and as soon as it’s available I will write a new one.
I suppose the most obvious field for Alpha to do original research is mathematics.
Perhaps Alpha will win the Millennium Prize.
Hey guys, if you really get this thing rollin’, there’d be an awesome addition to google. The only problem is that it just works in english, and since my german e.g. has a completely different structure you’d have to write a completely new engine to process the language.. anyway, good luck! In german there’s kind a saying ‘jemandem löcher in den Bauch fragen’, means in english ‘to ask somebody holes in the belly’ and is used if you ask someone endlessly 😀 So that’s what we’re going to do with Alpha <3
~moritz
Please be something that will kick googles anus 🙂
BTW is this a WordPress Blog?
I have a couple ideas about how an effective “computational knowledge engine” would affect fields of our scientific culture highly complex and often divided into uncountable subfield all sharing some points of interest with each other but having a different point of view (and sometimes language) to them… medicine and law would really come to hand as examples here…
However I am eagerly looking forward to have my hands on Wolfram|Alpha before any speculation since at this point it could be anything and nothing at once… Keep up the good work (and please, do it fast 😉 )
Congratulations to Wolfram on the completion of a long research and development project. The scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, artists, and others of Femtobeam will await a way to participate with Wolfram and Wolfram/Alpha. One of our great concerns is that of an unsecured network with access to the human brain as brain interfaces develop. We hope that the truth and the search for it will expand to the human mind in an elective and safe way for children and adults everywhere. We hope communications technology is not used for the wrong purposes and your efforts to open up education and seek truthful knowledge will inspire people to choose a future of effort to ensure a better future for the next generation, as our grandparents and parents did. Democracy is all about choices and freedom of the individual. Nothing could be more important than the human mind and spirit, something the truth will surely find.
Today there are ab/10 perspective PC approaches to rationalize the Web-3 Semantics approach (search/ logical machine)/ Wolfram’s Alpha seems to me most sophisticated & long going. I am not applied mathematics engineer would prefer not computation rather sematic multifolded location. I do believe the most advantage would achieve the command who most correctly shows/depicts the claster of solution tasks as well surely the commercial demand. I am scholar & really vision that rather van guard approach would produce positive simplification. It would surely lead to big lock-outs in IT sphere but as well greatly enlarge the opportunities for high-level investigations. wonderful results, new investment-research-investigations sphere still not available..it’s scholar-business in it’s approach but really it lies more in the sphere of parasemantic magics. I greatly admire Your mission & surely later write You more papers. We life in wonderful times when germeneftic studies enlarge our inner vision
Sincerely Yours, DeMin L.Igor Moscow
I can’t wait to see what a positive impact this will have within our education system. Let’s hope it illuminates inquisitive minds everywhere.
Do you use the Cyc inference engine or something like it?
We do not currently use the CYC inference engine. We continue to explore integrations with other technology and expect the community to also do that via the forthcoming API.
Congrats to all the Wolfram guys on making it to the final round of this huge undertaking. Can hardly wait. Wolfram|Alpha or BUST!
I’m very much looking forward to the launch! It micht change the way we use the internet in more ways than Google or many others have.
I can hardly wait to give her a spin! I just hope the answer isn’t 42 !
A huge step towards semantic web World.
Waiting to see it…
Sounds like a 1 – n relationship, or ‘1 to many’ to me, how are you going to embed this ?, will it scale to qubit requirements && evolutionary fit ? …. another license to print 1’s name
The 20 year timeline should be extended to the infinity symbol. As long as knowledge is pursued this will be an expanding application. Come to think of it, the word application is not exactly appropriate either for what this can and should endeavor to become. The goal as I hear and interpret the descriptions is to become an learning entity that lives to provide information to all those that would inquire of it. We should all come together and develop/create a name or moniker that can become synonymous with information conveyance. I look forward to watching this thing grow and to see how my daughter will one day use it. To those that are working to develop this: we look forward to seeing the fruits of your labor for your entire careers.
Thanks for all the hard work, and best of luck for the launch.
You wrote : “Our overarching goal, the “higher purpose†of this project, is to make all computable, factual knowledge available to everyone.”
Will it be available to use data written in other languages (for exemple french) ?
Anyway, thanks for fulfilling my dream…
Really looking forward to use this new interface. It’s been a long time since we have had something so radical in approach.
That Harvard presentation video appears to be unavailable as of Tues Apr 28 at 7:37pm EST.Hope they fix soon.
Hi,
I am anxious to learn more about how this works!
Wishing you every success in your endeavour, I look forward to the day when computers and the internet begin to show their true potential.
i like the mention of finite knowledge. It’s interesting that common vocabularies are from several hundred to several thousand words for basic existential ops. Adding specialist vocabs doesn’t greatly increase these numbers and large unabridged dictionaries are still quite finite. It seems quite possible that a finite # of persons could be recorded for a finite time and the files go far to generating substantial natural language capabilities.
I am sitting on pins and needles for this…My only concern is..I am in the mist of moving and..I hate the idea of missing the GRAND OPENING!@@~!!
Please….keep me in mind
hola
como ven me gustaria que pudierna mandar la informacion de este interesante proyecto en español a mi mail , pues es mi idioma natal y aun que me agrda leer en ingles desearia hacerlo mas comodament e en mi idioma gracias
Sukses juragan!
Kita tunggu perkembangan selanjutnya.
Heard Stephen’s talk today at Harvard in which he demonstrated Alpha. Incredible! It takes your question and figures out what you likely want, searches out data from a constantly increasing data base that comes from many sources; does significant calculations with the data, and presents it in multiple interesting useful ways. He says that it will be free; presumably some interesting ads on the side bars and will likely be available from within Mathematica (there are some huge data bases available now from version 6 and 7). There were some wild inputs that gave wonderful outputs. I wish I could give them to you; note some of the inputs on the upper right in this blog.
Just please don’t share the Cuil’s fate after an over-hyped launch! Please…
i’m sure wolfram will much-much better than google.. congrats for the wolfram team..
Congratulations. It is a great work and I am now looking forward to the official release. I for one am a die-hard fan of Mathematica and I am sure that this product will have just an enduring success.
….congratulation for Stephen and the team. Good luck and God bless you!
Look forward to the launch. When you’re ready I’ll have you as a guest on my Internet radio show.
I have one question for the actual product. i hope you could answer it.
There was an old game before for windows 95 i believe or before it was based on traps bombs rockets and you had to build a system so that you could catch a mouse or something like that. Which are all the trap games available for windows since 1990 to the present?
by the way amazing all that has been said about the product, unfortunately i was not one of the “beta testers”. but i’ll wait congrats!
Looks good the “Early Bird” 😉
So now you can catch some G**gle Worm,as the Birds Early in the Morning allways do. First come First Serve the Big one s 😉
Good Luck
Greetings from Southwest Germany near Stuttgart
Guido
Congratulation to the entire team for this fantastic job.
Cheers!
Thanks for all the hard work, and best of luck for the launch
I’m french; but i write english.
I’m interristing by your progect, so i’m waiting the first May to see.
Waiting for your official launch. Hope it will be soon.
Meanwhile, all the best!
Congratulations,
Great Work…
Is there a way one can be part of this project?
Regards,
Karan
Thank you all for the hard work , wish you the best for the lauch.
Thank you for creating W|A, it’s an act of supreme altruism to provide such a powerful innovation for free. If I can help in any way with testing or defect analysis..just let me know !
Looking forward to test your product. Best wishes from Denmark
Guys, congratulations – really curious to test it… you will implement some automatic screening of some high-impact-factor magazines?
And please don’t sell to Google for 3.000.000.000.000.000 $ !
Sure they will try to get you!
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 😉
[…] can hardly believe it, but one year ago today the Wolfram|Alpha Blog said hello to the blogosphere! Since that day we have published 176 posts covering everything from the launch […]