Sredzkistraße

A sneak peak at Wolfram|Alpha

There’s been a buzz about the internet in the past few months about Wolfram|Alpha, a “computational knowledge engine” announced in March. It’s been put together by Wolfram Research, the same people who came up with the Mathematica programming language and the project is headed up by English physicist Stephen Wolfram. It seems to be due to be released in 4 days, on the 18th of May, 2009. Today, a video was released demonstrating the power of the tool.

I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything in computer science or computational linguistics (question answering and information extraction are rather busy fields of research in CL) that’s impressed me so much. The sheer power, flexibility and ingenuity of the engine is indescribable.

The opportunities for computer scientists it will open up, once it’s released, are also endless. If the project can take the strain of its inevitable popularity and keep advancing at the current rate of development, I dare say it’ll be a definite watershed moment in the history of the internet.

I implore you to watch this video in its entirity.