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There is physicist Stephen Wolfram who wrote a blog post in early March announcing the imminent release of a new, highly sophisticated search engine, technology watchers from the Bay Area to Bangalore wondered if this was going to be The One. Wolfram claimed a breakthrough, an engine that does not merely crawl over Web sites seeking to find one that has already posted an answer to the question at hand. Instead, Wolfram|Alpha has at its disposal 10 trillion (and counting) points of data from fields like chemistry, meteorology, history and astronomy. It also houses a vast number of equations and algorithms to connect the numbers, giving it the ability to compute completely original responses.
Wolfram|Alpha is so new its impact is hard to predict, but some people believe it could transform search. Doug Lenat, founder of Cycorp, an Austin, Texas–based company working on artificial intelligence, says that Wolfram|Alpha represents the next step on the way to "something very much like the HAL 9000 computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but minus the homicidal-maniac tendencies." Compared to that, says Lenat, searching on Google is "like asking your dog to fetch a newspaper."
Wolfram says his creation is not so much a search engine as a "computational knowledge engine." It has a single input field, like a search engine, but users can pose complex questions. And yet the result is returned as quickly as a Google search.
Wolfram|Alpha is so new its impact is hard to predict, but some people believe it could transform search. Doug Lenat, founder of Cycorp, an Austin, Texas–based company working on artificial intelligence, says that Wolfram|Alpha represents the next step on the way to "something very much like the HAL 9000 computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but minus the homicidal-maniac tendencies." Compared to that, says Lenat, searching on Google is "like asking your dog to fetch a newspaper."
Wolfram says his creation is not so much a search engine as a "computational knowledge engine." It has a single input field, like a search engine, but users can pose complex questions. And yet the result is returned as quickly as a Google search.
