George Rebane
Stephen Wolfram may just be on to the next big thing on the internet. He and the boys and girls at Wolfram Research, Inc. are scheduled to launch Wolfram Alpha, a “computational knowledge engine” for the web. This engine is designed to “compute the answer to all factual questions”, questions the answer to which is an acknowledged fact. Examples are ‘What is the population of Berlin?’, ‘How much copper has Peru mined over the last 30 years?’, ‘Plot the spread of swine flu over the last three weeks.’, 'Solve a*x^3 - b*x = 0.'.
WAlpha will complement the Google search service, which provides you with a whole bunch of links that may or not answer your question or relate to your keyword(s) input. The WAlpha service will actually parse (pick apart with understanding) your query, and then go through a computational inference process to develop the answer either through known relationships (like in physics) or access it from available “curated” knowledge bases. The system will, of course, grow and get smarter with the passage of time and continued use.
Some of you will recall that Dr. Wolfram is a celebrated systems scientist who recently wrote A New Kind of Science. In this thick book Wolfram argues that very complex systems, like perhaps the entire universe, really operate on a foundation of myriads of simple algorithms executing and interacting – fundamentally the universe is a big ongoing computation. The complex dynamic activity we see around us is nothing more than emergent properties as a result of the execution and interaction of very simple algorithms. The universe is (in?) a giant computer.
Techies will also recognize Wolfram Research as the purveyor of Mathematica®, one of the two premier computational development environments for scientists and engineers. (The other is Matlab® by Mathworks, of which I am a longtime licensee.) Stephen Wolfram is a genius and a national treasure.
When WAlpha launches, I hope it will be a giant success that continues to expand and amplify how the internet (aka ‘the cloud’) is redefining us as human beings – homo cognosticus? This website (twine.com) has a good piece for more detail on WAlpha. Specifically, scroll down and read the comment by Doug Lenat (Dr. Douglas Lenat) who got a personal preview of WAlpha from Wolfram. Lenat is known in the AI world for running a years-long program down in Texas to codify common sense and make it computable. He has taken the intellectual property developed there (actually a humongous rule set) and started an AI company to develop and sell programs based on his work.
I want to leave you with the thought that the addition of Wolfram Alpha to the internet will be (given its success) another huge increase in how the cloud stores, organizes, and accesses data to generate information, and, possibly, increase knowledge. Today, we are still the necessary conscious executives who access this marvelous, but still passive, facility. Nevertheless, along with Google, such increases in capability bring us ever closer to the day when we may expect to be shocked by a voice from the cloud saying ‘I am here’.
A hat tip to RR reader SO who gave me the needed nudge to post on this.
[8may09 update] Here's a rather thorough YouTube video with Stephen Wolfram demonstrating WAlpha. Now people are putting forth the idea that WAlpha may be just the thing that Google needs to avoid anti-trust suits. But the real strategy is that WAlpha may be used by Google as its stalking dog to establish the market and interest in computational search before it unleashes its own version on which it has been working for some time. We shall see.
George,
I am looking forward to this new capability, should cut down my time on line doing searches. Here is a video preview at the Reference Frame
Posted by: Russ Steele | 04 May 2009 at 07:22 AM