Wolfram’s Debut: Does This Compute? I Think So. . .
May 18, 2009 by Craig Stoltz
Wolfram|Alpha opens to the public today at 3 p.m. I cringe to type the words “game-changer” but, well, there it is. At least I think.
[nb: The links in this entry may not work for the the public until 3 p.m. today, Monday, June 18, 2009. I think I have access as a Credentialed Member of the Bloggocracy, but I'm not sure.]
I’m a bit late to this Wolfram thing: Way-early adopters, artificial intelligence geeks, web semanticists and thousands of really really smart people worldwide have been onto this for a while.
But here’s the basic concept–conceit, one is tempted to say–as rendered by the company itself:
Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic
knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. The
company aims to collect and curate all objective data; implement
every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to
compute whatever can be computed about anything.
I know, I know: This sounds grandiose beyond imagining, like a schizophrenic PhD candidate’s desperate plea to angel investors to help pay for his final semester of tuition. It makes Google’s goal of “organizing the world’s information” sound downright humble.
But check it out. The very early release shows impressive capacity to generate, organize and compute data in response to real-language queries. It can also do a whole range of specialized computations whose value and complexity are beyond my ability to assess.
It’s not a search engine: It’s a “computational knowledge engine.”
One canned example from the site, drawn from a situation close to human experience: Say someone in your family diagnosed with colon cancer? Process the emotions then take a look at the unforgiving pure data:
Wolfram data on colon cancer
Another: Want to do scenarios about a stock market derivative type known by the delightful name “strangle option”? I thought so:
Strangle This: Wolfram lets you compute complex derivatives
Significantly, Wolfram outputs don’t explain squat. They provide raw numbers and the ability to do calculations with them. Need real explanation? A link to the right conducts a Google search of the topic.
The tool’s data reach is pretty limited in this release, so it’s pretty easy to baffle Wolfram into bashful retreat, viz.: “Wolfram isn’t sure what to do with your query.”
I’m not a mathematician, quant, engineer, botanist, derivative strangler or numerologist, for that matter. So I lack proper context to evaluate Wolfram fully. But I’ve never seen anything like this in a highly usable, consumer-facing product with capabilities in so many content areas. It strikes me as a platform that has enormous potential to. . .well, it’s not clear.
And that’s part of the fun.
Here’s a video in which Stephan Wolfram himself does a walk-through of the Wolfram|Alpha application.
I’m mainly a writer by trade, but as a writer it’s sometimes my job to know a little bit of everything. Since I’m not particularly adept with numbers/formula/hard data, I see this as a major new tool in my arsenal. Now I can find the nutritional data of an egg or a prediction of the next eclipse.
I also saw a video at Newsy suggesting this may compete with the not-quite-released Google Squared (though not the original Google search engine). I doubt that, but I suppose we’ll see.