Wolfram Alpha: May 2009 Archives

I barely know what Wolfram|Alpha is, but the news about it is, if not quite deafening at least growing volume.

All I know is that anybody with the stones to take on Google is somebody who merits attention.

Here's Wolfram|Alpha's goals:

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people--spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

Wolfram|Alpha is an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come. With a world-class team and participation from top outside experts in countless fields, our goal is to create something that will stand as a major milestone of 21st century intellectual achievement.

Whoa. That's quite a tall mountain. The Wolfram|Alpha project comes from Wolfram Research, the company created by Stephen Wolfram, himself the creator of the Mathematica, a system for computation, development and display of mathematical concepts that I barely grasp (and for which Wikipedia offers little to no help). I guess its one of those things: If you need to know what it is, you do. Otherwise it's way over ones head.

Aside: Why do I persist in writing lengthy blog entries on subjects I can barely grasp, let along understand fully? Beats me. I guess I live a charmed life of intellectual bliss that allows me to just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Blogging: It's what's for dinner.

Wolfram|Alpha appears to do many of the "tricks" that Google can do (add numbers, do metric conversions, and other "smart" stuff) but expand on that bag of tricks and be that kind of HAL 9000 computer that seems to know damn near everything and is able to present it as more than a bunch of crappy HTML links to pages that may or may not enlighten the Web trawler.

One cool thing: It can do seemingly complex math problems for you.

I'm no math whiz, but I entered "x cubed plus y squared equals 3" thusly:

x^3 + y^2 = 3

And got a graph, solutions for both variables and the "implicit derivatives."

Google didn't do as well.

Whether Wolfram|Alpha will amount to more than a bitchin' math tutor is meant to be seen.

But again, in case you missed it, anybody who says, "I can do better" than any big dog such as Google (or Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Linux ... fill in the blank) is what makes this big, dirty world go 'round.