That is what Wolfram|Alpha hopes to get to. The brainchild of Mathematica and other projects, Stephen Wolfram, is aiming at delivering a more relevant and accurate information than current day search is not capable of achieving , according to a reporting by The Independent and Wolfram’s blog. Frequenters of this space know that I have a strong desire for seeing information being made more useful. The observation that the explosion of content that is being rapidly added into the already vast Null Information was begging for the delivery of service that can accomplish what the Wolfram Alpha is presumed to be capable of; that is, making progress “towards what many consider to be the internet’s Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.” That way quantity of information becomes irrelevant. Quality as measured by relevance will be king. Indeed, the idea of incorporating the old and the new guard is what I find to be striking about the promise of this service. The internet provides an easily malleable platform that can bring to bear diverse sets of resources to partake in instant and collaborative sourcing of information. At the same time, there is the age old model of value of information being tailored by the origin. Expertise had and continues to have a role to play. I believe the tackling of the Null Information is one that will require the division of labor in evaluating and pricing, if you will, information. To that end, the folks at Wolfram Alpha seem to get it. They hope to leverage the knowledge of the experts in curating information. In this type of environment, where the old and the new are harmoniously integrated, the notion of publishing will continue to evolve and thrive. The other interesting evolution is in the ability of machines to interact with humans. Humanities attempt at taking baby steps towards broad proliferation of artificial intelligence lives on…
An excerpt of The Independent report:
The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet’s Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.
Although the system is still new, it has already produced massive interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet watchers.
Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet. Nova Spivack, an internet and computer expert, said that Wolfram Alpha could prove just as important as Google. “It is really impressive and significant,” he wrote. “In fact it may be as important for the web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.
Tom Simpson, of the blog Convergenceofeverything.com, said: “What are the wider implications exactly? A new paradigm for using computers and the web? Probably. Emerging artificial intelligence and a step towards a self-organising internet? Possibly… I think this could be big.”
Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as “how high is Mount Everest?”, but it will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts.
The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out “on the fly”, according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in “10 flips for four heads” and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.
Dr Wolfram, an award-winning physicist who is based in America, added that the information is “curated”, meaning it is assessed first by experts. This means that the weaknesses of sites such as Wikipedia, where doubts are cast on the information because anyone can contribute, are taken out. It is based on his best-selling Mathematica software, a standard tool for scientists, engineers and academics for crunching complex maths.
“I’ve wanted to make the knowledge we’ve accumulated in our civilisation computable,” he said last week. “I was not sure it was possible. I’m a little surprised it worked out so well.”
