Aware of Wolfram | Alphs Web Tool ?

@ptrikha_2 (45527)
India
June 4, 2009 7:55am CST
Hi All, Wolfram Alpha is a newly released Web based Computational search tool which would be providing exact or nearly exact search results -something Google is still far from . This would be a paid service ;although some sample results are there on the website : wolframalpha.com . Some more details : " (Credit: Wolfram Research) Stephen Wolfram has a track record of scientific breakthroughs and some controversy. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech in 1979 when he was 20 and has focused most of his career on probing complex systems. In 1988 he launched Mathematica, powerful computational software that has become the gold standard in its field. In 2002, Wolfram produced a 1,280-page tome, A New Kind of Science, based on a decade of exploration in cellular automata and complex systems. The book stirred up a lot of debate in scientific circles. Legendary physicist Freeman Dyson described the tome as "a case of style over substance." (See Steven Levy's Wired profile of Wolfram). In May, Wolfram will unveil his latest creation, now called Wolfram Alpha. It applies his work with Mathematica and NKS (A New Kind of Science) to Web search. "All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do," Wolfram said in a recent blog post. "I'm happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we're actually managing to make it work...It's going to be a website: www.wolframalpha.com. With one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms," he added. It follows the Google principle, with a simple input box, but takes a different approach to rendering search results. Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, which developed Twine, an ambitious "interest network" Web application based on semantic Web technologies, said that Wolfram Alpha may be as "important for the Web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose." Spivack shared his initial impressions of Wolfram Alpha based on a two-hour conversation with Wolfram. "Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain. It provides extremely impressive and thorough answers to a wide range of questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers, it doesn't merely look them up in a big database." "In this respect it is vastly smarter than (and different from) Google. Google simply retrieves documents based on keyword searches. Google doesn't understand the question or the answer, and doesn't compute answers based on models of various fields of human knowledge." Spivack gave some insight as to how the Wolfram's search engine works: Wolfram Alpha is a system for computing the answers to questions. To accomplish this it uses built-in models of fields of knowledge, complete with data and algorithms, that represent real-world knowledge. For example, it contains formal models of much of what we know about science -- massive amounts of data about various physical laws and properties, as well as data about the physical world. Based on this you can ask it scientific questions and it can compute the answers for you. Even if it has not been programmed explicity to answer each question you might ask it. But science is just one of the domains it knows about--it also knows about technology, geography, weather, cooking, business, travel, people, music, and more. " More on : http://news.cnet.com/wolfram-alpha-next-major-search-breakthrough/ Please do share your opinion on this breakthrough . Regards
2 people like this
3 responses
@getitok (278)
• China
16 Jun 09
I'm reading a new kind of science, I haven't finished it yet. Wolfram Alpha is a evidence to show us that it is really a new kind of science.
2 people like this
@ptrikha_2 (45527)
• India
13 Jul 09
Yes ; in a way it is .Thanks for sharing your views.
• United States
12 Jul 09
This tool seems to be very promising for future research and also helpful in providing information to millions of internet users. Regards
1 person likes this
@ptrikha_2 (45527)
• India
13 Jul 09
Hi Nagap12 , Thanks for responding .
@modstar (9605)
• Philippines
5 Jun 09
yeah i have tried it like 1 + 1 and it did gave me the result. I'm not sure yet but it looks kind of complicated for people who are not used to it's interface and results. It might come in handy though especially for me who is so weak in math. It's not only for math though, it can also be good for looking for definitions, exchange rates and many more. I do hope it will hit the net big time because it's useful indeed.
1 person likes this
@ptrikha_2 (45527)
• India
9 Jun 09
Thanks for sharing your views .