ONE MANS ANSWER

When Stephen Wolfram wrote a blog post in early March announcing the imminent release of a new,highly sophisticated search engine...

Physicist Stephen Wolframs computational Web engine has set technology watchers talking

When Stephen Wolfram wrote a blog post in early March announcing the imminent release of a new,highly sophisticated search engine,technology watchers from the Bay Area to Bangalore wondered if this was going to be The One. Wolfram claimed a breakthrough,an engine that does not merely crawl over websites seeking to find one that has already posted an answer to the question at hand. Instead,Wolfram/Alpha has at its disposal 10 trillion and counting points of data from fields like chemistry,meteorology,history and astronomy. It also houses a vast number of equations and algorithms to connect the numbers,giving it the ability to compute completely original responses. How old was Britney Spears on Sept. 11,2001? might be a question that has never been asked before,but Alpha knows the answer she was 19 years,9 months and 9 days old. Curious how unhealthy your grandmothers original chocolate-chip cookie recipe is? Input the ingredients,and Alpha calculates the calories.

Wolfram/Alpha is so new its impact is hard to predict,but some people believe it could transform search. Wolfram says his creation is not so much a search engine as a computational knowledge engine. It has a single input field,like a search engine,but users can pose complex questions. What is the current orbital location of the International Space Station? Computing where the ISS is right now is not a trivial computation, says Wolfram. You have to actually solve some differential equations for the motion of the aircraft in the Earths gravitational field. And yet the result is returned as quickly as a Google search.

At this early stage,Wolfram/Alphas knowledge reflects Wolframs scientific background. He earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at Caltech by age 20 and became the youngest winner of the MacArthur genius grant in 1981,just after his 22nd birthday. But for questions not rooted in science or numbers,Wolfram/Alpha throws up its hands. Wolfram insists the system is learning rapidly,but he concedes that it will always be limited to systematically computable knowledge,and only for a certain set of things has our civilisation gotten to the point where the knowledge is systematic.

The London-born physicists first hit came in 1988 with Mathematica,a program that did for complex calculations what Microsoft Word did for writing: provided a powerful but simple-to-use tool that quickly became an industry standard. Mathematica now has 2 million users and has made Wolfram fantastically wealthy. He has since published A New Kind of Science,a 1,200-page book.

Google wont say what it thinks of Alpha,but there are signs that its watching closely. In the past,Google has made a few halfhearted attempts to give users hard-and-fast answers,as Alpha does.