WolframAlpha

Wolfram Alpha

File:Wolfram Alpha.png
Type of site	Answer engine
Owner	Wolfram Alpha LLC
Created by	Wolfram Research
URL	www.wolframalpha.com
Commercial	Yes

Wolfram Alpha (also written as Wolfram|Alpha) is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine would. It was announced in March 2009 by Stephen Wolfram, and was released to the public on May 15, 2009.

Design

Users submit queries and computation requests via a text field. Wolfram Alpha then computes and infers answers and relevant visualizations from a core knowledge base of curated, structured data. Alpha thus differs from semantic search engines, which index a large number of answers and then try to match the question to one. In this way it has many parallels with Cyc, a project aimed since the 1980s at developing a common-sense inference engine.

Wolfram Alpha is built on Wolfram's earlier flagship product, Mathematica, which encompasses computer algebra, symbolic and numerical computation, visualization, and statistics capabilities. With Mathematica running in the background, it is suited to answer mathematical questions. The answer usually presents a human-readable solution. For example:

• lim(x->0) x/sin x yields the expected result, 1, a plot, and the series expansion. The button "show steps" provides a possible derivation of the result using L'Hôpital's rule.
• lim sin x/x/cos(x), x->infty is correctly interpreted as $\textstyle \lim _{x\to \infty }{\frac {\sin x}{x\cos x}}.$ The answer given is 0 although in fact, the limit does not exist. (This can be seen by observing that the limit superior of the function is infinite, as $\textstyle \sin({\frac {\pi }{2}}+2\pi n)=1$, $\textstyle \cos({\frac {\pi }{2}}+2\pi n)=0$ for all $\textstyle n\in \mathbb {N}$, but that $\textstyle \lim _{n\to \infty }{\frac {\sin n\pi }{n\pi \cos n\pi }}=0$.) However, Wolfram Alpha is also capable of responding to natural-language fact-based questions such as "Where was Mary Robinson born?" or more complex questions such as "How old was Queen Elizabeth II in 1974?" It displays its "Input interpretation" of such a question, using standardized phrases. E.g., "Mary Robinson | place of birth" or "age | of Queen Elizabeth II (royalty) | in 1974". It is also capable of performing calculations on data using more than one source. For example, "What is the forty-eighth smallest country by GDP per capita?" yields Pakistan, $696.59 per year .

The database currently includes hundreds of datasets, including All Current and Historical Weather. The datasets have been accumulated over approximately two years, and will continue to grow. The range of questions that can be answered will grow with the expansion of the datasets.

Technology

Wolfram Alpha is written in 7 million lines of Mathematica (using webMathematica and gridMathematica) code and runs on 10,000 CPUs (though the number was upgraded for the launch).

System requirements

Wolfram Alpha requires an up-to-date web browser. Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 3, Safari 3, Google Chrome and Opera 9, along with all subsequent releases of these browsers, are compatible with the website. On older browsers, it does not display text correctly and renders a message that states Sorry... Wolfram|Alpha requires a more up-to-date web browser... on its home page.

An IPhone application was released on 19 Oct 2009, to provide an optimized interface for mobile access.

Launch

Launch preparations began on May 15, 2009 at 7 PM CDT (May 16, 2009 0:00 UTC) and were broadcast live on Justin.tv. The plan was to publicly launch the service a few hours later, with expected issues due to extreme load. The service was officially launched on May 18, 2009.

Wolfram Alpha has received mixed reviews. Wolfram Alpha advocates point to its potential, some even stating that how it determines results is more important than current usefulness.

Further reading

• Wolfram Alpha: A New Way To Search?, Stephen Wildstrom, BusinessWeek, March 9.
• Stephen Wolfram's Answer To Google: If Wolfram/Alpha works as advertised, it will be able to do something Google can't: provide answers that don't already exist in indexed documents. by Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek, March 10, 2009.
• Better Search Doesn’t Mean Beating Google by Saul Hansell, The New York Times, March 9, 2009.
• Wolfram Alpha will Take Your Questions -- Any Questions, Ian Paul, PC World, Mar 9, 2009.
• Wolfram Alpha: Searching for Truth: Stephen Wolfram talks with Rudy Rucker about his Upcoming Release by Rudy Rucker, H+ Magazine.
• "A hungry little number cruncher: Wolfram Alpha search tool mines databases to yield math-based replies" by Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe, May 5, 2009
• The Answer Engine, a Radical New Formula for Web Search by Steven Levy, Wired, May 22, 2009

External links

• Official website
• Wolfram Alpha is coming, Stephen Wolfram's blog.
• Recorded launch video.
• Ten easter eggs.