Math-Based Query Service WolframAlpha to Debut This Month

May 20, 2009

Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, is about to introduce his question-answering Web service WolframAlpha. It "has the potential to be quite important," its maker predicted.

Wolfram "has done a great job of marrying the acquisition of data with the mathematical algorithms," David A. Ferrucci, an IBM artificial intelligence researcher, told the New York Times.

Creating such a system "has wound up being considered something that is virtually impossible," Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer at Microsoft, observed. Its existence shows "that it wasn't impossible," he added. "It involved applying lots of different tricks."

In response to a question about the distance of the moon from Earth, for example, WolframAlpha uses an algorithm that takes into account the ever-changing distance between the two bodies. The engine that computes such answers is largely based on Mathematica

Unlike search engines such as Google or Yahoo, WolframAlpha does not gather data from the Web. Instead, its knowledge base is made up of information—some basic, some highly specialized—that employees at Wolfram Research have gathered, verified, and organized over several years.

Artificial intelligence expert Doug Lenat (Cycorp) noted that WolframAlpha should be able to handle an astronomical number of questions. Hence, it may become "a massive player alongside Google," Lenat calculated.

"There is a huge space of possible questions that Google doesn't answer," Nova Spivack, chief executive of Radar Networks, added. So, WolframAlpha may have applications beyond the arena of academic research.

"We are actively pursuing interesting relationships," Wolfram indicated.

Source: New York Times, May 11, 2009.