IT PRO Reviews | Wolfram Alpha review

As soon as it was announced that a new search engine was on its way in the form of Wolfram Alpha, claims that the ‘Google killer’ was here were inevitably made.

However, it only takes a couple of minutes of using the new arrival to make it apparent that it’s really something quite different, and that comparisons to Google are wide of the mark.

Marathon not a sprint

Wolfram Alpha describes itself as a ‘computational search engine’. In the words of Dr Stephen Wolfram, the mastermind behind it, it looks set to make all of the world’s knowledge “computable and accessible to everyone”. That’s a pretty tall order by anyone’s standard so it’s no surprise that Dr Wolfram reckons it’ll be a ‘long term’ project.

What Wolfram Alpha has at its fingertips is more than 10 trillion pieces of data, more than 50,000 types of algorithms and computing models, and a computing cluster of 10,000 x86 processors, with which to work its magic.

There are essentially three parts to the process. First it to get hold of all that data, and store it in a large, fast database. To do anything useful with that data, the system employs something called, Mathematica, a computational modelling system that Wolfram Research has been working on for 20 years. This is the part that does the clever stuff, through smart organisation of the data and application of the algorithms.

The third piece of the puzzle is the natural language interpreter that takes human enquiries and turns them into something that Wolfram Alpha can understand – the bit that is displayed as the ‘input interpretation’ box after you search.

Wolfram Alpha: The online computational knowledge engine : Product …

Many of you have heard of Wolfram Alpha and have often wondered what it is. Well we can tell you that it is an online computational knowledge engine, which calculates answers for searches that already exists, so nothing like Google then.

Some of the questions that we are talking about are how long would it take to get to Saturn, while travelling at the speed of light? Or what is the velocity, or altitude of the International Space Station? The answer to the first question by the way is, “75 minutes — can be found in a fraction of a second.”

The Los Angeles Times explain that users of Wolfram Alpha can submit their own customized questions, and then the online computational knowledge engine will work the answer out on the fly. The answer is not given like Google and Wikipedia give you, instead Wolfram Alpha tries to use the actual corpus of human knowledge, which should give a more accurate answer.

Writing for the Web: An early review of Wolfram Alpha

The new Wolfram Alpha search engine has the potential to be an excellent tool for journalists — but it’s years away from becoming a game-changer, Paul Bradshaw writes.

Bradshaw highlights the "computational knowledge engine’s" ability to search parts of the "hidden web" that most search engines don’t reach, such as databases, as well as its potential to provide quick answers to questions about relationships and facts better than Google.

However, at the moment, natural language questions work best if you’re looking for very specific information about something well-known. For instance, Wolfram can tell you what year Charles Dickens was born, but it can’t turn that around to tell you what writers were born in that year, he said.

Particularly useful, Bradshaw adds, is the ability to compare things – "for example, The Guardian vs The Telegraph, or London, Birmingham and Manchester." It also is good at calculations of various sorts, from converting fuel use to fuel costs to figuring out the calories in your lunch.

Overall, he says, the tool can be a time saver, but there are drawbacks. For instance, while Google lets you intuitively evaluate the credibility of a source, it’s unclear where the information provided by Wolfram is coming from or how accurate it is.

Bradshaw concludes that "Wolfram is an engine waiting for the world to catch up. The technology is enormously impressive – really, game-changingly important. But the material it has to work with is, currently, sparse."

Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors’ blog: Wolfram Alpha to …

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Making the world’s knowledge computable

Today’s Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone.  You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer.   Based on a new kind of knowledge-based

Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they’d quickly be able to handle all kinds of things and that one could be able to ask a computer any rationally factual question, and have it come up with the solution.

But that was not the case. Computers have been able to do many remarkable and unexpected things. But so far not that.

I’d always thought, though, that eventually it should be possible. And a few years ago, I realized that I was finally in a position to try to do it.

I had two crucial ingredients: Mathematica and NKS. With Mathematica, I had a symbolic language to represent anything—as well as the algorithmic power to do any kind of computation. And with NKS, I had a paradigm for understanding how all sorts of complexity could arise from simple rules.

But what about all the actual knowledge that we as humans have accumulated?

  Lots of it is now online—in billions of text pages. And search engines can very efficiently search for specific terms and phrases in that text.

But we can’t compute from that. And in effect, we can only answer questions that have been literally asked before. We can search for information, but we can’t figure anything new out.

So how can we get around this? Well, some people have thought the way forward must be to somehow automatically resolve the natural language that exists online. Perhaps getting the web semantically tagged to make that easier.

But armed with Mathematica and NKS I realized there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable.

Tis is not easy to do. Every different kind of method and model—and data—has its own special features and character. But with a mixture of Mathematica, NKS automation and a lot of human experts, I’m happy to say that we’ve gotten a very long way.

But, OK. Let’s say we succeed in creating a system that knows a lot, and can figure a lot out. How can we interact with it?

The way humans naturally communicate is through language. And when one’s dealing with the whole spectrum of knowledge, I think that’s the only realistic option for communicating with computers too.

Of course, getting computers to deal with natural language has turned out to be very difficult. And for example we’re still very far away from having computers systematically understand large volumes of natural language text online.

But if one’s already made knowledge computable, one doesn’t need to do that kind of natural language understanding.

All one needs to be able to do is take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations.

Of course, even that has never been done in any generality, this is further complicated by the fact that one doesn’t just want to handle a language like English: one also wants to be able to handle all the shorthand notations that people use in every field.

I wasn’t at all sure it was going to work. But I’m happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we’re actually managing to make it work.

Pulling all of this together to create a true computational knowledge engine is a very difficult task.

But I’m happy to say that we’ve almost reached the point where we feel we can expose the first part of it.

I think it’s going to be pretty exciting. A new paradigm for using computers and the internet.

That almost gets us to what people thought computers would be able to do 50 years ago! 

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Wolfram Alpha

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