Wolfram Alpha, New computational search engine Options

[The_Psychonaut]

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.[3] It was announced in March 2009 by British physicist Stephen Wolfram, and was released to the public on May 15, 2009.[1]

Users submit queries and computation requests via a text field. Wolfram|Alpha then computes answers and relevant visualizations from a knowledge base of curated, structured data. Alpha thus differs from semantic search engines, which index a large number of answers and then try to match the question to one.
With Mathematica running in the background, it is, of course, very well suited to answer purely mathematical questions. The answer usually transcends the pure statement of a result, by showing a human readable solution.
Example: lim(x->0) x/sin x yields the expected result, x=1, as well as a possible derivation using L'Hopital's rule.
Wolfram|Alpha makes inferences from a smaller set of core information. In this way it has many parallels with Cyc, a project aimed since the 1980s at developing a common-sense inference engine. Cyc founder Douglas Lenat tested Wolfram|Alpha before its release:
"The resulting mosaic covers a large portion of the space of queries that the average person might genuinely want to ask. [...] It handles a much wider range of queries than Cyc, but much narrower than Google; it understands some of what it is displaying as an answer, but only some of it [...] The bottom line is that there is a large range of queries it can't parse, and a large range of parsable queries it can't answer."
—Douglas Lenat[4]




Just noticed Wolfram Alpha has gone public. After a quick play, I can confirm its awesomeness. Looks like it's limited to a fairly narrow range of search topics for now, but I can already see myself using it quite a bit based just on it's math results.

For example, it can compute fourier and laplase transforms:

Fourier transform exp(-x^2)

It also seems good with geography, chemistry and dates, and it seems they've included a few easter eggs as well:

What’s the speed of an unladen swallow?

This post has been edited by The_Psychonaut: May 18 2009, 11:39 AM

[Caelum]

Hmm, so it has actually been released... Interesting.

[Kimmo]

http://forums.atomicmpc.com.au/index.php?showtopic=15240

[Director]

It didn't handle 'chemtrails' too well? ;P

This post has been edited by Director: May 18 2009, 02:54 PM

[The_Psychonaut]

http://forums.atomicmpc.com.au/index.php?showtopic=15240

Hmm, mybad. I searched for both wolfram alpha and www.wolframapha.com but for whatever reason, that didn't come up.

[ozacube]

Maybe you should of Wolfram'ed it along with forums.atomicmpc.com.au for better results than the atomic 'search'. :-P


Not that I'd know now; I haven't needed to search anything since switching over to the new forums.

[Girvo]

http://forums.atomicmpc.com.au/index.php?showtopic=15240

Wot 'e said!