Wolfram Alpha is created by Wolfram who created the Mathematica software.
Check out the story of Mathematica from Malaysia Technology News.
In the apparent manner, Wolfram Alpha is a search engine. You type in a question, it will answer back. It works similarly to search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and etc.
However, the underlying technology is different. Wolfram Alpha is powered by the technology which powers Mathematica. It computes answers (real time) and not search for published answers.
In other words, search engine like Google works by matching content similarity and creates a vast sea of indexes. For Wolfram Alpha, it works by matching facts and compute them into results.
For instance, if you ask a question 'how many cars in malaysia ?'
In Wolfram Alpha, it derives that there were 5.5 million vehicles in year 2003.
In Google, someone (i.e Wikipedia) has to publish the article first.
While it may require some gut to trust the result of Wolfram Alpha, the ingenuity of it is being acknowledged where it literally sits on top of contents and making use of its Mathematical functions to recalculate facts and then to present the result in an overview manner. And this makes it cool!
The way I see it, it is one of the technology which will mark the dawn of mainstream Artificial Intelligence. The machines are coming!
Check out the story of Mathematica from Malaysia Technology News.
In the apparent manner, Wolfram Alpha is a search engine. You type in a question, it will answer back. It works similarly to search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and etc.
However, the underlying technology is different. Wolfram Alpha is powered by the technology which powers Mathematica. It computes answers (real time) and not search for published answers.
In other words, search engine like Google works by matching content similarity and creates a vast sea of indexes. For Wolfram Alpha, it works by matching facts and compute them into results.
For instance, if you ask a question 'how many cars in malaysia ?'
In Wolfram Alpha, it derives that there were 5.5 million vehicles in year 2003.
In Google, someone (i.e Wikipedia) has to publish the article first.
While it may require some gut to trust the result of Wolfram Alpha, the ingenuity of it is being acknowledged where it literally sits on top of contents and making use of its Mathematical functions to recalculate facts and then to present the result in an overview manner. And this makes it cool!
The way I see it, it is one of the technology which will mark the dawn of mainstream Artificial Intelligence. The machines are coming!
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