Introducing Wolfram Alpha
Stephen Wolfram is building something new -- and it is really impressive and significant. In fact it may be as important for the Web (and the world) as Google, but
for a different purpose. It's not a "Google killer" -- it does something different. It's an "answer engine" rather than a search engine. took a
close look at Wolfram Alpha's capabilities, discussed where it might go, and what it means for the Web, and even the Semantic Web. Stephen has not released
many details of his project publicly yet, so I will respect that and not give a visual description of exactly what I saw. However, he has revealed it a bit in a recent
article, and so below I will give my reactions to what I saw and what I think it means. And from that you should be able to get at least some idea of the power of
this new system.
A Computational Knowledge Engine for the Web
In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a "computational knowledge engine" for the Web. OK, so what does that really mean? Basically it
means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you.It doesn't simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google
does, and it isn't just a giant database of knowledge, like the Wikipedia. It doesn't simply parse natural language and then use that to retrieve documents, like
Powerset, for example.Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions -- like questions that have factual answers such as
"What is the location of Timbuktu?" or "How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?," "What was the average rainfall in Boston last year?," "What is the 307th digit
of Pi?," or "what would 80/20 vision look like?"Think about that for a minute. It computes the answers. Wolfram Alpha doesn't simply contain huge amounts of
manually entered pairs of questions and answers, nor does it search for answers in a database of facts. Instead, it understands and then computes answers to
certain kinds of questions.
(Update: in fact, Wolfram Alpha doesn't merely answer questions, it also helps users to explore knowledge, data and relationships
between things. It can even open up new questions -- the "answers" it provides include computed data or facts, plus relevant diagrams, graphs, and links to other
related questions and sources. It also can be used to ask questions that are new explorations between relationships, data sets or systems of knowledge. It does
not just provides textual answers to questions -- it helps you explore ideas and create new knowledge as well)
How Does it Work?
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.
It also has a natural language interface for asking it questions. This interface allows you to ask questions in plain language, or even in various forms of abbreviated
notation, and then provides detailed answers.
The vision seems to be to create a system wich can do for formal knowledge (all the formally definable systems, heuristics, algorithms, rules, methods, theorems,
and facts in the world) what search engines have done for informal knowledge (all the text and documents in various forms of media).
How Smart is it and Will it Take Over the World?
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.
But as intelligent as it seems, Wolfram Alpha is not HAL 9000, and it wasn't intended to be. It doesn't have a sense of self or opinions or feelings. It's not artificial
intelligence in the sense of being a simulation of a human mind. Instead, it is a system that has been engineered to provide really rich knowledge about human
knowledge -- it's a very powerful calculator that doesn't just work for math problems -- it works for many other kinds of questions that have unambiguous
(computable) answers.There is no risk of Wolfram Alpha becoming too smart, or taking over the world. It's good at answering factual questions; it's a computing
machine, a tool -- not a mind.One of the most surprising aspects of this project is that Wolfram has been able to keep it secret for so long. I say this because it is
a monumental effort (and achievement) and almost absurdly ambitious. The project involves more than a hundred people working in stealth to create a vast
system of reusable, computable knowledge, from terabytes of raw data, statistics, algorithms, data feeds, and expertise. But he appears to have done it, and
kept it quiet for a long time while it was being developed.
Competition
Where Google is a system for FINDING things that we as a civilization collectively publish, Wolfram Alpha is for COMPUTING answers to questions about what we as
a civilization collectively know. It's the next step in the distribution of knowledge and intelligence around the world -- a new leap in the intelligence of our
collective "Global Brain." And like any big next-step, Wolfram Alpha works in a new way -- it computes answers instead of just looking them up.
Wolfram Alpha, at its heart is quite different from a brute force statistical search engine like Google. And it is not going to replace Google -- it is not a general
search engine: You would probably not use Wolfram Alpha to shop for a new car, find blog posts about a topic, or to choose a resort for your honeymoon. It is not
a system that will understand the nuances of what you consider to be the perfect romantic getaway, for example -- there is still no substitute for manual human-
guided search for that. Where it appears to excel is when you want facts about something, or when you need to compute a factual answer to some set of
questions about factual data.
I think the folks at Google will be surprised by Wolfram Alpha, and they will probably want to own it, but not because
it risks cutting into their core search engine traffic. Instead, it will be because it opens up an entirely new field of potential traffic around questions, answers
and computations that you can't do on Google today.
The services that are probably going to be most threatened by a service like Wolfram Alpha are the wikipedia, cyc, Metaweb's Freebase, True knowlege, the start
Project, and natural language search engines (such as Microsoft's upcoming search engine, based perhaps in part on Powerset technology), and other services
that are trying to build comprehensive factual knowledge bases.
