The British scientist Stephen Wolfram has a clear vision for the future – a vision that dates back to his childhood in the 1960s and 70s. In those days, we didn’t prophesise that computer technology would bring us convenient ways to shop, or new ways to talk to our friends in short sentences. The dream was much grander – that computers would work out stuff for us, a bit like Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey (without the murderous intent).It was with this aspiration that Wolfram launched Wolfram|Alpha, a website that aims to be able to answer any factual question asked of it. Wolfram says he wanted to create an “insanely ambitious thing, like the science fiction computers of old”. Currently, for example, when we want to know something on the web, our default action is to Google it, but this just searches for words rather than calculating answers, so leads you only to what has already been written, which may or may not be what you want to know. Wolfram|Alpha, on the other hand, is an attempt to change the way we interact with knowledge on the web, to make the web more intelligent – by providing bespoke, freshly computed answers from a curated database of sourced facts.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/feb/12/stephen-wolfram-alpha-interview-google
Stephen Wolfram: Can he topple Google?
The British scientist Stephen Wolfram has a clear vision for the future – a vision that dates back to his childhood in the 1960s and 70s. In those days, we didn’t prophesise that computer technology would bring us convenient ways to shop, or new ways to talk to our friends in short sentences. The dream was much grander – that computers would work out stuff for us, a bit like Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey (without the murderous intent).