WolframAlpha - backing up the facts

I really love this idea. The concept of cramming all the knowledge you can into one place and making it accessible to the world is so bold and so ambitious that you have to admire the guys at WolframAlpha for trying to pull it off.

"WolframAlpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim 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."

Now that's an formidable goal!

As you can see, WolframAlpha aims to be more than just a search engine. You can ask it about essentially any kind of systemic factual knowledge. In much the same way as some search engines work (Ask Jeeves), you can ask WolframAlpha specific questions such as: “why does a camel have two humps.” But that is where the similarities end. Instead of searching the web and returning links, WolframAlpha performs computations on its own internal database, using software programmes, and returns answers based on its findings.

Some of the data in that knowledge base is derived from public or private websites, but most of it comes from systemic primary sources. As you can imagine, this is a massive job and it is neverending....which is why if you ask the question “why does a camel have two humps" - it won't be able to answer you, at least not just yet.

As the project progresses more information will be available whilst the Wolfram team work through all the content areas covered by reference libraries, handbooks, and much more.

With so much work involved, (WolframAlpha is currently 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code together with many terabytes of data), it might be a while until we see the final release. But if the first version is an indication of things to come we can expect a lot more from Dr Wolfram's team in the future.

If you want to follow its progress you can track the teams latest news through the Wolfram blog and community area of the website.