http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style … 78109.htmlhttp://bytesizebio.net/index.php/2009/0 … ram-alpha/There has been a lot of buzz recently about Wolfram’s new product, the Wolfram Alpha (WA). After attending a webinar on WA, I was given a preview account, and started messing around with it. In case you were wondering, that is the extent of my involvement with Wolfram Research, LLC, I don’t even have a Mathematica license. After playing around with WA for a few hours, I can safely say the following: it’s different, it’s incomplete, it’s idiosyncratic, and it’s funky cool. And no, it will not dethrone Google, nor does it aim to do so. Pish-posh.
It’s Different
Stephen Wolfram describes WA as a “computational knowledge engine”. It is not a web search engine: the information is curated and internal to WA, not searched over the web. Neither is WA an encyclopaedia: the information it provides on any topic is rudimentary, and mostly calculable. If you enter a country’s name, it will give you its GDP, GNP, size, population, but not its history. WA is more like an almanac with computational capabilities.
Yes, you can look up facts, like the GDP of Germany, the population of London, or the height of the Eiger. But the real power of WA lies in its ability to take data that can be numerically represented, and compute new relationships. A simple example is who has the larger population: Los-Angeles or New-York, and by how much?
I'm thinking this has better applications for specific users/industries than for the general population. Still, interesting and undeniably cool.
