You want to know the current distance between the Earth and the moon, given that the moon’s orbit is elliptical. Into a single field, you type the question as you would ask it of a human being — and you get the answer. That’s the vision of Wolfram Alpha, a new and potentially revolutionary “computational knowledge engine” that goes public next week.
Details are emerging about this latest creation from Stephen Wolfram, the Champaign, Ill.-based scientist whose Wolfram Research is best known for its Mathematica software and for A New Kind of Science (NKS), a best-selling book and approach to scientific problems using a set of basic formulas.
Built on Mathematica and NKS
On his company’s blog, Wolfram has said his new answer tool was built using Mathematica’s “symbolic language to represent anything,” its “algorithmic power to do any kind of computation,” and on NKS’ “paradigm for understanding how all sorts of complexity could arise from simple rules.”
Currently, he wrote, search engines are efficient in answering questions that have been asked before because they retrieve existing knowledge. But how do you ask a question about something that hasn’t been answered before?
One way, according to Wolfram, could be the emerging semantic Web, where information is tagged as to its meaning. But another way, the approach taken in Wolfram Alpha, is using algorithms to “explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable.”
If knowledge is computable, he said, natural-language inquiries don’t need to be understood. They need to be represented in “a precise form that fits into the computations one can do.”
In interviews with The New York Times and others, Wolfram is downplaying reports that Wolfram Alpha’s target is search-engine king Google. As he has pointed out, his new tool doesn’t search Web pages, but uses logic rules to interpret a huge knowledge…