Wolfram Alpha ‘knowledge engine'

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Wolfram|Alpha (also written WolframAlpha or Wolfram Alpha) is an answer-engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, instead of providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer. It was announced in March 2009 by British physicist Stephen Wolfram, and was released to the public on May 15, 2009.

Tech

Wolfram|Alpha is built on Wolfram's earlier flagship product, Mathematica, which encompasses computer algebra, symbolic and numerical computation, visualization, and statistics capabilities. It is written in 5 million lines of Mathematica (using webMathematica and gridMathematica) code and runs on 10,000 CPUs (though the number is upgraded for the launch

Knowledge Engine

A NEW site that aims to catalogue “as much of the world’s knowledge as possible” and use it to answer every question imaginable has the tech industry buzzing.

Developed by British physicist Stephen Wolfram, the Wolfram Alpha “knowledge engine” was this week opened to the public — and much fanfare.

The idea is that if Google sorts through all the pages on the web and tells you which one to read, Wolfram Alpha reads them itself and then tells you the answer.

In Wolfram’s words:

“We’re trying to take… all the data and methods and models and algorithms that have been accumulated in our civilisation and make them immediately computable so that anyone anywhere can just go to the web and use all that knowledge to compute answers to their specific questions.

However Wolfram Alpha’s usefulness depends entirely on what you ask it.

Things it can tell you include the time the sun rose on the day you were born, the amount of energy required to melt 50g of gold and how long it would take a journalist to write 3000 words in shorthand.