CH 54: Alpha Behavior
One of the most sophisticated websites on the Internet can surely be found at www.wolframalpha.com. It is the brainchild of Stephen Wolfram, whom you already read about in chapter 10, and his team at Wolfram Research.
The ultimate goal of Wolfram Alpha is to accumulate and organize all of humanity’s knowledge, and then through a very simple interface allow anyone, anytime access to this knowledge for free. You might be asking how such an idea is any different than what the folks over at Google are up to. The answer is revealed in the method by which these two websites find information. With Google, it is a matter of first indexing pages and then having an algorithm that relevantly lists pages that are based on the keywords that the user supplies. In the case of Alpha, it is about taking the input and actually performing mathematical computations and calculations. This is a more technically challenging problem to crack, but it is also a more powerful application. For example, you can type in distance from the earth to the moon, and Alpha will actually perform differential equations to instantly calculate our distance from the moon at the moment the query was made. You can enter your birthday and immediately know your age in months, days, etc. You can type your birthplace and receive a detailed weather report on the day you were born. If you are unsure of your location, “where am I” will provide an answer. It can perform integrals (calculus based formulas for determining areas around functions), it can have a sense of humor if you ask it how it is feeling, it can create nutrition labels, like the ones on the packaging of most foods but for precise quantities and types of food that you specify. The list truly goes on and on with the capabilities of this software and the likelihood is that Wolfram Alpha will already be more capable and effective by the time you are reading this.
Uh, is this the ON switch?